Cages
by Jtlahj
Summary: Blaze is enjoying her last day at a corrupt bank in a crumbling city when the unthinkable happens. Her good nature will be her undoing, putting her in the direct path of Gotham's agent of chaos. And while he claims to have no definitive plan for her or Gotham, The Joker does have one clear objective: push Blaze and Gotham to their limits. Rated for sexual violence. Not a romance.
1. Yellow, A Prologue

Yellow, A Prologue

The first time I met him, there was hardly a thing that stood out about him. He was tall, but everyone was tall to me. He was dressed in clothes so plain that the only thing worth noting about them was their plainness. His eyes were small, dark marbles that pierced me over my computer screen.

The first time he walked into my place of employment he had a a fat manila envelope tucked under his arm. He was greeted by the security guard, as was everyone, with a careful, "Evening, sir," to which he did not respond. His hunched shoulders aligned with the others in the ever-long queue. Large hands grasped each other whilst he waited, beady eyes twitching.

We first met gazes when he was second in line. As I called forth the stout woman in front of him, I saw the whites of his eyes as they pierced and probed something above him. In the single moment it took for me to notice him gazing at the ceiling and shift my eyes to my new customer, he captured me in the first of many knowing glares.

It was then I noticed the man's… disfigurement. His Glasglow smile, as it were, was visible even from fifteen feet away courtesy of the haze of stringent overhead lighting.

My attention shifted to the stout woman in short. She could hardly see over the towering counter. "Hello, ma'am, welcome to Gotham National Bank. How can I assist you today?"

And so began the transaction, no different than any other. She explained from behind her set of horn-rimmed purple glasses that she needed a $100 bill to give to her grandson for his graduation. She delved into every imaginable crevice of her grandson's college plans as I pretended to listen intently.

I had become increasingly aware of a gaze threatening to skewer me from fifteen feet away. Without a speck of doubt, I knew to whom the gaze belonged. Glasglow. _Hopefully_ , I thought, _Dennis or Mark or one of those other shitheels down the line gets this creep. Am I imagining him glaring at me?_

At some point, I thought I heard Anabelle's monotone voice ask after another customer and just out of the corner of my eye, I saw Glasglow usher the man behind him forward. In mild disbelief, I snapped my gaze from the woman's flapping pink lips to him ever-so-briefly and was met with a slanted grin and slitted eyes.

 _He knows I don't want him in my line._

I snapped my attention to the $100 in my suddenly sweaty palm. I was reluctant to hand to the woman and have her grandmotherly presence replaced with such an ominous one. But with no other option, I clicked 'EXIT' on her account screen and slid the bill to her over the desk.

"Thank you for choosing Gotham National Bank, ma'am. Have a nice evening and tell your grandson I said, 'happy birthday.'"

My fake cheeriness was pitched back in my face when I realized I'd not only cut the woman off mid-sentence but also confused her grandson's occasion. She corrected sternly, "Graduation," before gripping the bill and waddling off. I paled and resisted the urge to smack my forehead before a gawky frame filled my vision.

"Hello, _ma'am_ ," Glasglow cooed, bringing my full attention to his dingy yellow teeth. He pressed his elbows against the counter, seeming to take every opportunity to tower over me. His fingernails were long, yellow, sickly. He sucked in the bumpy lines of his scarred cheeks at me and released them with a moist slapping sound.

I cringed at the sound before redirecting my attention to my computer screen. "Welcome to Gotham National Bank, sir. How can I help you tonight?"

He let the silence proliferate to the point of awkwardness before mocking, "I just had some _quest_ ions about your _estab_ lishment here, Misses…" he exaggeratedly twisted this way and that to get a good look at my name tag, hidden by my left boob.

" _Miss_ Blaze, sir. And do you have an account with us already or were you – "

"Bla _ze_ ," his emphasizes in a deep, but oddly lilting voice. He made no move to disguise his inspection of the light scar on my mouth. My scar was a surface scratch compared to his gruesome marring. "Fitting for a beautiful, blooming redhead such as yourself. Is that a first or a last name, _Miss_ Blaze?"

"First. Do you already have an account with us today, sir, or can I direct you to - ?"

"No, I think you've covered everything," Glasglow says. I feel him eyeing up my scar again and I find myself bowing my head on impulse. When he spoke next, it was the first time he sounded genuine, "It's pretty awful isn't it?" he gestured with an open hand to his own face and I immediately knew to what he is referring: coming into every conversation scar-first, seeing the question behind their eyes.

I plastered a tight grin on my face and stood to my full height, never breaking eye contact with him. "You have a lovely day, sir."

I slapped my "Next Teller, Please" plaque between his elbows. I stomped to the break room, my heels clacking ridiculously against the hardwood.

I ate my lunch in a furious haze, sucking on my spoon with peanut butter so hard it nearly snapped it in half. _How dare he?_ I thought again and again. My hell was in people asking after my scars, of having to politely deflect their interest, of those few moments when their gazes sear into my eyes in an effort not to glance at it. There was a special place in hell for someone who knew that pain and still inspired it in others.

Soon, though, the incident with Glasglow faded from memory. The last time I thought of Glasglow that day was when I laid down in bed after snapping off my heels and wiping off the layer of makeup that blurred the redness of the scar. The white tissue ran halfway down my chin, dividing my bottom lip into uneven halves. I slid my tongue along the raised internal edge of it before let sleep find me.

The first day I met the Joker was also the first day of my last week at Gotham National Bank. Following the chaos created by Scarecrow, I, along with many of my fellow Gothamites, had decided that Gotham was no longer fit for inhabitants. I had Chicago in mind, already secured a bank manager's position at a smaller Illinois bank and put in my two weeks at National. I had no ties to cut, no family to coerce to help me move. The entire process took depressingly little time for me to finalize.

The first day I met the Joker was utterly normal. The second day I met the Joker was the last normal day I would ever have.


	2. Cupcake

Cupcake

There were a couple concessions made to me on my last day at Gotham National Bank. A small red velvet cupcake awaited me in the breakroom fridge, courtesy of my best work friend Anabelle. My manager, Dave, graciously informed me that if we weren't overly busy, I could even close down early.

Always true to his word, Dave clapped me on the shoulder at 5:13 instead of my usual 6:00, gave me a firm handshake and told me to count down my till.

I counted 3 twenties, 4 tens, 9 fives, 30 ones, 14 quarters and about half of my dimes when my eardrums nearly burst with a procession of gunshots. My dimes clattered to the floor with a descending series of cringe-worthy clangs. Yells, some commanding and some terrified, filled the lobby.

"Alright everybody - hands up, heads down!" a voice commanded. There was a terrible stretch of moments in which I was petrified of moving even the slightest of muscles. I could only watch as three figures hefting guns and sporting clown masks crept lowly into the bank.

 _I cannot be this unlucky…_

In my haze, I could only make out the tone of what one of the clowns was saying. He'd begun with Dale, who was the farthest from me. He hefted Dale over the counter and shoved him against his desk. No one had paid me any specific mind, nor paid Dave any mind as he stewed in his office just outside of the clown's field of vision. He reached for something under his desk and tore his glare from the clowns to me. He administered a curt nod.

"Hands up!" I heard the clown demand of Annabelle. He was steps away from me as I jammed my fingers down hard on the silent alarm.

Too soon, the clown addressed me. His mask leered at me exaggeratedly, a plume of red hair jutting from the top. I heard and felt his assaulting breath as he snatched the front of my button down. He all but tossed me over my desk and at his feet.

That was enough to wake me. "Hey, fuck you!" I pushed my skirt down my legs as I tried to stand. _How dare he manhandle me – us – like this?_

Before I could stand, however, a gloved hand smacked against my chest and bounced my head off of the desk behind me. "Hey!" I spat before the glove clamped over my mouth.

" _At-ta-ta-ta_ ," an excited lilted voice comforted me. I glared up at the robber, different from the one who'd hauled me over the counter. His frame was longer, larger, his mask a separate shape and expression from the other clowns. The mask frowned down deeply at me but inside, I could glimpse two smiling pinprick eyes. "Let's not let this get _blown_ ," he waved the gun in my face, "out of proportion."

He seemed pleased with himself when he pulled his gunpowder-flavored glove from my face and forced my fingers around something. There was a loud click.

My hand was pressed around a grenade. For the first time that day I felt fear, magnificent and opaque.

I forced myself to capture the clown's dark eyes as he stood to full height. "Do you know who owns this bank? Do you even fucking know who you're stealing from, clown?"

He tilted his head. Though I could not see his eyes from my angle at his feet, I could feel them climb over me. I felt suddenly, ruthlessly betrayed by my wardrobe choice. My heels crammed my knees into an odd position, my black pencil skirt bunched up my legs a bit higher than was intended. He leaned down again, head still cocked stupidly. I felt a leather-clad finger brush against my lower lip and I twisted away, very nearly taking my hands from the grenade to push him.

But the clown moved on from me before I could blink. _Did that just happen?_ I marveled as he migrated to the next hostage, twisting their fingers around grenade after grenade as the other clown explained, "Obviously, we don't want you doing anything with your hands other than holding on for dear life."

"Stay down, stay down!" the third clown yelled. He was wider than the others, I noticed with only morbid curiosity as he swung his gun around at my fellow tellers and I. We were all hunched at the feet of our desks in varying stages of a panic attack. "Nobody make a move!"

The boom of another gunshot pierced me. I wretched my head to the side as glass showered over me. It took every ounce of my willpower to maintain my hold on the grenade.

Dave stomped with impressive authority through the window he'd just blown through and cocked his gun. He made his way to the two remaining clowns, stepping over the heavyset one he'd just killed. One, two, three rounds were discharged as he stalked frowny clown between desks. Frowny clown hunched behind them for protection, joined shortly by the leering clown who'd wrenched me over the desk.

"Do you have any idea who you're stealing from?!" he exclaimed, "You and your friends are dead!"

There was a pause and then another gunshot.

At this point, I was peering down at my white knuckles. So I couldn't see it when a series of several smaller-sounding shells were discharged and someone hit the floor. But I could hear it. I clenched my jaw as I pondered whether or not my boss was dead or dying feet from me.

"Where did you learn how to count?!" leery clowns exclaimed. I squeezed my eyes shut as I heard footsteps approach me. If it was possible, I gripped the grenade tighter.

The feet scuffed to a halt an inch from my butt cheek. Again came that mocking voice from above, "So you knew about the mob owning this place, did _ja_? What are ya, a mob boss' daughter or somethin'?"

I didn't have to look up to know which clown had taken an interest in me but I looked up anyway to make myself shake my fear. I just glared.

"Oh, if looks could _kill_!" frowny clown shrieked, making me jump internally. "Pretty goodie-two-shoes like you figures out the mobs got their _greasy_ fingers where they don't belong... I'd think you'd want out, cupcake."

I sneered at him, hating my position. He condescended to me in every verbal and physical way possible, looming over me like an ominous circus blow-up balloon. I so, so wished I could have made the bastard gulp my grenade. His gun, stowed prominently in the waistband of his trousers, urged me otherwise.

"Today was my last day."

His whooping laughter made me jump for real this time. He doubled over with mirth and I had to move my head out of the way to keep our heads from bumping. I peered around his legs to see the other clown facing him as well as even a few of the tellers eyeing him up out of the corner of their eyes. At least I wasn't just imagining how odd this guy was being.

 _What are the clowns waiting for?_ _Are their others who are trying to break into the vault? The vault is impenetrable anyway. And where the fuck are the cops?_

A forth clown burst into the room, hefting a load of duffels stuffed with money. Thankfully, the clown's arrival brought an end to frowny clown's fit of laughter and diverted his attention from me. I tried to peer around the desk shielding my managers collapsed form, but I could only make out his twitching head.

 _He's not dead_. Relief settled over me. I eyed the fallen heavyset clown, much closer to me. The skin of his marred back was a matted dark red beneath his sport coat.

The clowns busied themselves, stowing their guns as they gathered the bags of money toward the opposite side of the room from me. I tried to busy myself with pondering the improbability of them actually hacking our vault instead of further inspecting the dead body feet away from me. They must have been career criminals, I decided, to have been able to bypass the electrically charged safe. Or at least well-prepared criminals. I tried to pin down which among the group was the leader, attempting to glimpse specifics about them for the inevitable police reports. Frowny clown had colorless hair slicked to the back of his neck with what looked like treacle. The rest of the clowns had a mop of cherry-red or blue hair on the top of their heads from the mask, the backs of their dark heads close-shaven. All of them were white, all simply dressed. Subtle differences in height could be noticed. No visible ink or scars. Whomever had planned their operation certainly did plan well.

I was still watching them when the clown who'd dragged me over my counter cocked his gun and aimed it at frowny clown. Frowny clown froze and slowly rotated at the sound.

"I'm betting The Joker told you to kill me soon as we loaded the cash."

Frowny clown tilted his head again and shuffled his feet backward. His lilting voice was low, "No, no, I kill the bus dri _ver_."

"Bus driver? What bus - ?"

Another explosion, more grand and deafening than any before, rocked me. There were several screams from those closer to the explosion as they tried to deflect the falling rubble. The back of a dingy yellow bus sat where the wall once was. There was the sound of a body hitting the floor. Leery clown.

Another clown – _fuck, how many did this "Joker" send?_ – pushed out of the back of the bus. The newcomer and frowny clown began stowing the money into the back of the vehicle.

The clowns seemed to be finishing their job. They could not have hoped to stay any longer without police involvement after the explosion.

"What happened to the other guys?" the bus driver inquired as they finished up.

More gunshots rang out and the bus driver collapsed. It was a genius plan The Joker had, really, to pick off members of his own crew after their jobs were done. Fewer shares, fewer witness. I peered down at my freckled thumbs with mild admiration.

The bus door clicked open once more. I willed the single remaining clown, the frowny clown, to leave. Sirens drew closer in the distance and I felt tears prick with relief.

But before the door could shut a voice intoned, "Think you're smart, huh? Well, the guy who hired you will just do the same to you." I knew what he was doing. Trying to make him stay the precious few seconds it would take for the police to arrive.

Frowny clown twisted his head over his shoulder to peer down at my manager. And then that bastard, that _fucking_ bastard, took the bait. He jumped down from the cusp of the bus and gave his head a shake. He began to close the distance between them.

"Sure, he will. Criminals in this town used to believe in things." Frowny clown crouched over him as I watched in horror. The bus collision had shifted all of the desks so I had a perfect view of frowny clown as he reached for something in his front pocket.

"Stop talking!" I wanted to scream when I saw my manager pop his mouth open again. "Honor. Respect," I looked left at my fellow bank tellers, eyes all cast down. I kicked off my heels, not prepared to sit idly by as I saw my manager killed. "What do you believe, huh? What do you bel - ?" The clown moved toward him with what looked to be a grenade.

"Stop!" I shrieked, launching my grenade behind me and into the far corner of the break room. It was the only area where it could not hurt anyone.

To the chorus of the explosion behind me, I turned to frowny clown to see him momentarily frozen. Without giving myself time to hesitate, I threw myself across the twenty feet between us.

And that was where my plan went a little awry. I anticipated knocking the asshole to the ground, hopefully hard enough to disorient him so I could grab his gun and hold him at gunpoint until the police arrived. But frowny clown was lithe, strong. He twisted me around, taking advantage at my slight stumble from the shock of the explosion, and pinned me against the desk by my arm.

"You've got a little fight in you. I _like_ that." He rested his chin against my shoulder, the edge of the mask scratched my cheek. The stench of greasepaint filled my nostrils and I twisted away. Something thin and cold bit my cheek and corrected the angle of my face. A knife.

"You sick fuck," I snarled. I begged the other tellers with my eyes but again their gazes were cast down onto their shiny heels and loafers. The bastard exhaled a laugh that aired on the side of a growl.

"See!" my manager intoned with renewed vigor. "No fucking respect! You people used to have beliefs!"

Frowny clown shoved me hard toward the bus and I fell before I could regain my footing. He plunged his knife deep into my calf.

"I believe," frowny clown coolly intoned over my screams, "that what doesn't kill you simply makes you… _strang_ er."

I turned in agony to see frowny stuff a grenade in the manager's mouth. He stood and twirled back to me.

It took me a terrible suspended moment to realize he had removed his mask. The greasepaint I'd smelled earlier was smeared all over his face. Sunken black hollowed the holes of his pinprick eyes, cherry red followed the uneven lines of his scars and mouth. Giesha white filled the rest of his face. Patches of skin flashed through where the mask had been resting.

But his face. Glasglow's perpetually grinning face was unmistakable beneath the paint. His full lips curved when they saw the recognition in my eyes, punctuating his scarred grin.

He snatched my arm and began dragging. I was in anguish, twisting this way and that despite the strain it put on my injury. The sirens were nearing, I needed to deter him mere seconds to escape.

But no sooner had I thought past the pain and arrived at this conclusion had he snatched me up under my armpits and tossed me into the back of the bus. I scuttled away from him over the bags of money.

Panic registered as he stalked toward me. He resumed dragging me down the dividing aisle of the bus. The knife still submerged deep in my calf caught on the leg to one of the chairs and darkness found me. But even in my lapse in consciousness, a single question slipped over me: _Why would he bother to take me?_


	3. Indisposed

Indisposed

When I woke I was seated, being jostled this way and that. I was in a wide-windowed vehicle, watching as a dusky Gotham tumbled past me. The wheezing of a dubious engine could be heard above the light breathing to my back. Two long arms held tight around my ribcage. The tanned forearms, all raw muscle divided by bulging veins, were visible between the rolled up, lightly patterned green sleeves and the edges of black gloves.

I didn't need to think hard to remember the gunshots and grenades, the cheerfully-masked bodies and a mocking Glasglow smile dripping red with gore. The stench of gasoline, gunpowder and grease paint was still thick in my nostrils. My hair fell across my face. Buffets of wind found me every so often and with varying levels of intensity.

 _I'm sitting in Glasglow's lap_ , I realized with disgust. Against my better instincts, I remained as still as I could, attempting to feign unconsciousness. His attention, to my limited knowledge, remained focused on the large window ahead.

 _He's strong,_ I thought, glaring at his arms. The insides of his wrists were stained white in places, black in others from his face paint. My back bumped against his hard chest as he turned the steering wheel. The wheel rubbed against my knees, shifting my skin with each turn. My calf still shrieked at me and I felt a rivulet of cool blood trickle down my black tights.

Cop after cop whizzed by us on the opposite side of the road, the sounds of the sirens migrating far and close and far again. I risked a slight tilt of my head to watch them go. _Is there a way I could signal them?_ I wondered, eyeing the wheel. _If I could only jerk the bus to intersect their path_. It wouldn't take the police long to discover that the Joker had escaped via bus, there had been eight witnesses to attest to such. Soon they'd start setting up a perimeter. _But would I still be alive by then?_

My hand twitched toward the wheel as I weighed my options. He must've seen.

The clown chuckled piercingly in my ear and nuzzled his chin against my shoulder. The cool edge of the knife found the top of my thigh, the same one the bastard had stabbed me with. The small serrated splint of metal was smeared red down to the handle. He must have been kind enough to relieve my calf of it while I was unconscious.

The blade smeared my blood on my tights as though spreading jam on toast. _Caught you_ , it taunted. I glared out the window so he couldn't see the small defeat register on my face. I shook some of my hair out of my eyes.

"Oh, come _on_ , doll-face," he continued to steer with one hand as he swirled the knife delicately along my skin, "If you keep this up I might get the idea that you, _uh_ , don't want to spend _time_ with me."

I felt his arousal to my back and I couldn't help but let out a small sob. _Not again, not again, not again_ , I chanted inwardly. I clenched my eyes shut tight. "Why did you take me?" I whispered, sounding more like a tired child going to a dentist appointment than I would've liked. I hadn't meant to say it out loud and I mentally slapped myself.

"Well," he began with irritating grandeur. I could tell he was eagerly awaiting the question. "Despite the benefits of a human shield, you were just too _funny_."

I don't know if it was the condescension in his tone or his reference to me as a human shield, but something yanked me into action. I tried to pry away his hand from my thigh and slam on the brakes, but the seat was set quite far back and my legs could hardly reach.

His solid arm crushed me fully against him. I clawed at his arm and beat at his legs at their positions on the pedals but his left foot pinned both of mine against the seat.

Frustration mounted as I saw the ease with which he subdued me while still driving. He'd hardly even broken a sweat and I was barely able to catch my breath as he continued lowly, "You don't even flinch when I wave a gun in your face but you call me a 'sick fuck' when I pull out a knife? Can you feel how sick of a fuck I am, _Miss_ Blaze, or do I need to _show_ _youuuu_?"

I knew immediately that he was referring to his now-painful arousal. I pressed my eyes tight against his insinuation and turned to a different tactic for escape. I searched out of the window for passerby, police, anyone who could see us. _Someone has to have seen us by now. We're driving in a yellow bus, I'm being manhandled in the front seat of a vehicle with massive windshield by a guy wearing clown makeup_.

The light ahead of us must've turned red. He depressed the brake and we screeched to a neck-snapping stop. I eyed up the family of three in the white sedan to our left. There was a little girl strapped into a booster seat, making what looked to be a giraffe plush dance in her lap. There were two other forms in the front seat, though the head closest to me was turned toward the driver.

I tried to will all of my energy on the little girl. If there was ever a time for anyone to be telepathic, now would be it. Her bangs bounced on her forehead as she spun the giraffe around. _Please look at me, please look at me, PLEASE LOOK AT ME!_

My line of sight was interrupted by the clown's slightly hooked white nose as his chin shifted from my right to left shoulder. He lapped at his red paint as he had when we first met and let his eye wander to mine. I cringed from the sound and memory, turning my face reluctantly away from the car.

I tried to busy myself with deciding whether or not I was sorry for jumping in front of Dave back at the bank as I watched Gotham carelessly roil by. Dave probably was not alive, I decided. The grenade the clown had popped into his mouth would attest to that. But I could not have imagined standing by.

"How'd you get the scar?" he interrupted my train of thought. His voice was rumbling and low, an human approximation of a growl.

I tried to maintain a hold over myself as both the light and I turned green. We lightly pressed forward. I knew he was trying to get under my skin, to confuse my thoughts. I tried to ignore him and figure out where he was taking us but I could not keep my light quivering at bay.

I let the silence stretch though it was becoming increasingly painful. The bus shuddered and sighed as it bumped over potholes, accelerated and decelerated. I wondered morbidly if he would just stab me eventually for my silence as I continued to shake.

Not surprisingly, he took it upon himself to speak. _Does this guy ever fucking stop talking?_ "You know, you remind me of my ex-wife. Pretty long curly hair, peachy white skin, secrets shoved so far up her ass she could _taste_ them," with a movement so fast I barely had time to flinch, he shoved the knife through the top of my skirt, nicking my inner thigh. The tip poked against my underwear. "And I _hate_ my ex-wife!"

"You motherfucker!" I spat in disbelief. I clawed at his unbudging hand holding the blade. I barely even noticed when we screeched to a stop.

"Maybe it would help if I told you how I got mine?" His tone was light again. I felt him nod as if to assure me _see, isn't that better?_

"I don't care how you got your scars you fucking fr – " His gloved hand twisted my face to peer into the thin mirror overhead. His gloves pinched my cheeks so hard my lips poked out. "Look at me," he urged quietly and when I kept my eyes screwed shut he growled with shocking ferocity, " _LOOK_ AT ME!"

"NO!" I yelled back, trying to pry his hand from my face. He pressed the knife harder into my underwear and I felt it grotesquely divide my vulva.

He groaned lowly in appreciation, placing his forehead against my temple, "Feels like you've got _two_ pairs of luscious lips- _sah_. Maybe we should give the ones down _there_ a matching scar."

My shaking had increased to an embarrassing level. I wanted nothing more than to be relieved of his raw, rapacious presence and to wash the scent of him from me. I felt the need to clutch my hair in frustration at my helplessness. Instead, I struggled to take a deep breath and creak open my eyes.

His mirrored form bored its inhuman eyes into me from behind his eyebrows. A hint of amusement lit the blackness of his eyes as he caught my glare.

 _How can he enjoy this?_

"I'll tell you what, Miss Blaze- _zah_. I thin _k_ ," he jolted his hips forward in his seat so I was hanging off the edge of it. I struggled to remain on the seat without putting weight on my bad leg, "you don't want to tell me about your scar because it's a nasty little memory for you," his voice dropped low as though he was sharing a secret, "Did you get in a car accident? Did you smack your pretty little freckled head on the sidewalk when you were a tike?" his lips tickled my ear, "Did you do it to yourself or did someone _do it_ for _youuuu_?"

I tried to keep my voice as even as possible, but my body betrayed me. I trembled as though I was soaked to the bone in the dead of winter, "Let me go." It was a wonder he could keep hold of me with quantity of sweat I was producing.

The clown flashed me his yellow teeth again and popped open his mouth. Before he could speak, there was a knock.

There was a gargantuan man at the driver's side window. I opened my mouth to scream for help before I saw he was only mildly intrigued at my precarious position. He addressed the demon at my back, "You want me to unload the money, boss?"

"Help," I squeaked pathetically. He didn't even spare me a sideways glance.

"The money's not already in the building?"

The man nodded before he started toward the back of the vehicle. The clown let me fall to the floor. I howled as I landed directly on my wound, trying to pull myself off of it using a bus seat for support. The grit from the filthy floor embedded itself in my palms and knees. The clown stepped over me with surprising grace and skipped toward the back of the bus, humming to himself all the while. His jumps made the bus shudder.

My hands still quivering and slick, I managed to pull myself up and into the tattered blueish seat, never breaking my eye contact with his back. He seemed wholly concerned with helping the giant unload the duffels of money. _Does he think I'm too injured to run away?_ One of the bags seemed to have allowed a couple bills to spill out, patches of muted green fluttered among the backmost seats of the bus along with some of the grayish rubble from the explosion.

I stumbled toward a protruding mechanism on the driver's dashboard and shoved it toward the steering wheel, careful not to put any weight on my right leg. The door gasped open. The clown still hadn't paid me any mind. I faced the three low stairs that would usher me to my freedom with reluctance. But with a fair amount of effort and the assistance of the rusted silver bar running parallel to the stairs, I soon collapsed against the outside of the bus.

The clown had nestled the vehicle close to an apparently abandoned warehouse. No, not abandoned. Several men filtered out to assist the clown in unloading the stolen cash. I wasn't too keen on waiting until one of them noticed me. I veered left and forced myself to shuffle along the otherwise empty street, complete with blown out storefronts and damaged sidewalks. The streets were poorly lit with towering streetlights glowing an anemic yellow. There was not a soul to be seen. Smart people weren't out past dusk in the Narrows. Specifically for reasons such as this.

My leg dragged behind me as I hobbled through the dark street, using brick walls and parked cars to push off of. I did my damndest to avoid some of the denser sections of broken glass glittering dangerously below but it didn't take long before even more of my blood trailed out behind me.

On any other day but that one I was a dart. I'd raced competitively all through high school and college, even trying out for the Olympics once. Hell, my college teammates even embroidered "hellcat" on all of my jerseys and jackets. If only they could've seen me then, reduced to a horror movie trope. If I could just shuffle far enough away before he noticed… but I felt the intensity of his gaze as physically as a hand pressing into my back.

"Hey!" I heard a male voice yell and then another, lighter voice. The clown sounded entertained, "She won't get far."

I couldn't help but look back to find him comically exasperated, throwing his hands up as if to say _I can't believe this girl_.

I whimpered to myself but pressed on. It didn't take me more than a few moments to realize the clown had driven us to the Narrows. I'd be hard-pressed to find an upstanding citizen here. _Then I'll have to help myself._

I took the first turn I could so I was out of his sight. I glared behind myself again before I could round the corner and was surprised to find he'd hardly moved since calling off the other man. Instead, I found him shrugging off the bus some hundred feet away. Even from that distance, I could pick up on the predatory glint in his eyes as he glanced from the trail of blood at his feet to my hunched from.

 _He's toying with you. He let you go for a reason, he wants the chase._

I pushed myself harder when I saw a pay phone about fifty feet away. I could not hope to make it much longer. My tights were torn to the ankles from the scuffing of my feet along the glass. I could hear his lazy footfalls echo mine.

After what felt like a small eternity, I hefted off the wall to the right of the payphone and braced my weight against the shell of the console. With quivering fingers, I picked up the reciever. A dial tone greeted me warmly.

A metallic clatter sounded from behind me. The clown was thirty feet away with bits of odd change scattered at his feet.

"I'm guessing you don't have your wallet with you, cupcake."

I nearly sobbed again when I realized he was right. My stupid fucking skirt didn't even have pockets. I flopped my head back against the console, chest heaving.

"Please," I whispered. The change was no good to me as far away as it was. I could scarcely imagine making it there and back, I had reached my absolute limit of pain. And we both knew he would never let me make a call. I white-knuckled the receiver. "Please stop this! What is wrong with you?! Someone _help me_!"

"Oh, come _onnnn_ ," he lilted, clearly enjoying himself. He skipped toward me, twisting one foot in front of the other. "If you can get the change, I promise I'll let you make a c _alllll_. Here, I'll even make it a little easier for you," to my surprise, he bent down to pick up a couple of the larger coins and toss them closer toward me. Only ten feet now.

I swallowed the plea for humanity bubbling in my throat. There was a sense of rawness to the pleasure in his eyes. He knew his offer was too good for me to refuse. I was an ant and he was putting his boot in front of me in every direction that I turned, corralling me into a puddle.

I could at least let my hate for him be known. I could at least glare him down as I played his game. And glare I did as I slumped to the floor. Any more movements using my leg were out of the question. I felt my cheeks flame in embarrassment as I crawled closer to him.

He did a poor job of smothering a grin. I knew where his diseased mind would wander seeing me on my hands and knees but I would not let my chance to escape slip past me.

 _Let him think he has the upper hand. I will find a way, I will find a fucking way._

He put his hands in his pockets, tilted his head. His stance was nonchalant but his eyes were low, calculating, consuming the image before him with a raw energy that nearly made him vibrate with glee.

I finally broke his gaze to snatch up the five quarters. My eyes, cheeks and neck burned as I shuffled back to my reprieve. He trailed me painfully close this time, mere feet away but always out of my immediate view. His steps were leisurely. I was tempted to trip him when he began whistling. When I looked up at him again, he made a show of checking an imaginary watch on his wrist.

I clenched my teeth and closed the remaining distance to the foot of the booth. With major effort, I made it to my feet. The clown rested his shoulder and head against the dome of the rusted payphone stand, jostling the entire thing. I shoved the quarters into the coin slot.

I finally brought the receiver to my ear when I felt the knife fall on my side. I tried to find the anger in my fear.

"Who 'ya gunna call, princess?"

My voice sounded more drained than I would've liked, "I thought you said you would let me make a call."

I heard the wet sound of him smiling. "I do have a couple," he pretended to be thinking of the words, "ground rules. No police, you really cannot trust them in this town. It's more likely one of my men will answer than yours. No mentioning where we are or my name," _Like I know you're name, dumbass_ , "No signaling in any way that you're, _mmmmm_ , should we say _indisposed_?"

" _What_?!" I shrieked, " _You_ said I could make a phone call! You said you wouldn't stop me!"

"And I'm not stopping you, beautiful. I'm just re _strict_ ing you."

"Then _what_ is the point of me making a phone call if I can't call for help to get away from _you_?!"

"Wouldn't want your loved ones to get worried, _would_ we?" he trailed the side of the blade up my side. He let the blade dip into the valleys between my individual ribs, trailing each wiry bone from my front to my back playfully. His hips pressed me painfully forward against the hard edge of the payphone booth, leaving me little room to escape him if need be. His head hovered close to mine and I suspected he would watch me dial to assure there weren't many 9's and 1's involved. His knife kept me on the absolute cusp of a full-blown panic attack.

 _But I will find a way, I will find a way_.

"I fucking hate knives," I ground out to the keypad. I brought the receiver to my ear again.

"I'll be listening, sugar. _Dial_ ," he growled. And with no other choice I did dial, drawing the process out as he swirled the knife. I leaned away from him as much as I could in the confined space.

There was only one number worth calling, the only loophole I could think of. My fingers found the numbers on the keypad with a practiced ease. I'd deleted the number from my phone the day of our break up, a meaningless action as I had it memorized. I'd dialed the number time after time following the last day I'd seen him, but I'd never pressed the call button. I'd typed the number out on top of a wordless text when I'd finalized my move, but I could think of nothing worth saying.

When I finished dialing was when I felt my stomach flip like a little girl calling her crush. I wasn't even sure if he would pick up. It'd been so long. _What a ridiculous thing to worry about_ , I thought, _with a murderer and a knife pressed against my back_.

"Oh and by the way," the clown intoned over the second shrill call tone, "my name is The Joker."

 _Fuck. He was the leader of the bank robbers._ I'd suspected as much when the giant had called him "boss," but having my hunch confirmed at such a dire moment did me no favors.

My panic didn't even take a moment to be felt before it was redirected completely. A familiar voice filled my ear, "Hello?"

My voice broke, "Blake?"

"Blaze? Blaze, I was just thinking about you. I meant to call you after the whole Scarecrow thing to see if you were okay but you know…"

Yes, I knew. He wanted to save himself some embarrassment if I didn't pick up. We hadn't exactly broken up on the happiest of terms. I could picture him now, jutting ears pricked red with apprehension as he sat in his apartment. "I understand. I wanted to call you too but I didn't know… I needed – wanted you to…" I stopped when I felt the clown raise the hem of my skirt with the tip of the knife.

"Are you okay, Blaze? You sound… not sick, really, just weird."

"I…" The Joker pushed my hair from one side of my neck to the other, trailing his fingernails across the back of my neck and tracing my goosebumps. His fingers stopped when he heard my reply, "No."

The Joker yanked my hair back. I'd hoped he was bluffing when he said he could hear the voice. His entire body was curved into me, my scalp and leg burning.

"No? You're not okay?"

The Joker yanked my head back even harder and touched the blade to my throat. "Come on, princess," he whispered in my ear, as though the threat of a knife at my neck wasn't threat enough.

"I'm okay," I gasped, "I think I'm sick." _Sick of this crazy piece of Narrows shit pawing me up._

"Sick? The amazing, impenetrable Blaze is sick?" His tone was light and I wanted to howl in frustration.

The Joker might as well have used that blade to slice off my tongue. I was at a loss for words, suddenly catatonic with a mixture of rage, frustration, the need for self-preservation and sentiment for Blake. "Blaze?" I popped my mouth open but no sound came forth, "Are you still there?"

 _Fuck it._ "I'm in the Narrows, the Joker kidn –!" I was thrown down by my hair, the receiver wretched from my hand. I landed hard on my ass, but the receiver dangled at my feet. Blake was still on the line. "He kidnapped me! We're outside of a liquor st - !"

The Joker slammed the phone down hard enough to cause permanent damage.

He loomed with hunched shoulders over the receiver for a long beat, fingers still brushing against the plastic still probably slick and hot from my hand. When he finally did turn to me, he made no effort to conceal the murder in his eyes.

I glared up at him, just barely able to maintain his gaze. The darkness around his eyes had turned greasy, running down the deep laugh wrinkles surrounding the sockets of his eyes.

In that moment, I understood fully the purpose of the makeup. The makeup made it hard to believe you were looking at something human. Yet, overwhelmingly, the most monstrous thing about him was the shallow blackness of his eyes as he twisted his mouth to the side and very obviously started to think of what to do with me.


	4. Little Mercy

Little Mercy

I finally seemed to have rendered him at a loss for words.

After a startlingly long stretch of silence, he released a chuckle that seemed far away. There was an air of disbelief to him, as though he couldn't quite grasp that I, of all people, just gave away the location of one of his warehouses. I hadn't exactly told Blake its address, but I had given him enough that The Joker would have to be crazy to think his warehouse was safe. Especially considering that Blake was a brand new member of the Gotham police force.

The Joker moved fast, sweeping his hand down in a sharp arc. The cut was small and precise, right at the apple of my right cheekbone. I felt thin liquid slip down my face. Before I even had the time to register the pain, I had the wind knocked out of me as he hefted me onto his back. He towed my screaming form back to the bus. My leg and head throbbed with every step. My new cut leaked red down the back of his shirt. The stream intensified as more blood rushed to my head.

I pummeled and clawed at his back, but it wasn't until I aimed a hard elbow to where I suspected the kidneys were that he slid me off of him and into someone else's rough hands. I looked back and found the giant holding my struggling arms at my sides. He had to bend down to catch my hands.

My struggles were weak from windedness and I eventually just slipped my head back to rest on the giant's chest so I could glare. The Joker's eyes never left mine. His tone was taut, businesses-like as he addressed his men. Gone was the lilting grandeur, "Tie her up and load her and the money. Clear out the warehouse and move everything south."

"Boss? The south warehouse is half the size – " The Joker burst into motion so quickly I'd only just registered his movement when there was a dull _thunk_ to my back. The left side of my face was misted with liquid. The man's fingers went slack around my wrists.

When I turned, part of me already knew what I was going to see. I'd seen multiple dead bodies that day. But their deaths were relatively bloodless, their faces had been covered. In that moment, I stood in the arms of a man with a knife buried to the hilt in his right eye and I could only stare. His muscles were still twitching, not caught up to the fact that his brain was dead.

His weight shifted forward after a suspended moment and I suddenly found myself trapped beneath his massive frame and the ground.

My terror at being pinned to the floor by a dead body was only maximized by a resounding chorus of laughter at my expense. My right cheek scuffed raw as I struggled to free one of my arms from beneath my stomach, but I couldn't so much as lift my body a centimeter from the ground to do so. My eyes must've been as wide as planets, my screams muffled by the body's flesh as it continued to twitch above me. The handle of the knife poked into the ground by my head, blood from the skewered socket dripping onto my hair.

"Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place!" The Joker mused between fits of shrill laughter, mocking tone resurfaced. His voice showed no indication of helping me.

I knew what The Joker must've felt and seen as he looked down at me. He saw something pathetically small, bloody and battered, completely at his mercy.

The skin of my forearm felt as though it tore completely off when I finally wretched my arm from under myself. I jammed my hand up between the body's head and mine awkwardly. I shoved. His shoulders moved so I was able to raise my own head, now free of his fleshy cage. I rested my forehead against my arm, suddenly fatigued down to my marrow and gasped into the cement.

I'd reached my absolute wit's end. I'd woken up this morning, tossed back a cup of green tea because I was trying to stay away from coffee. I armored up in makeup, hair and that stupid motherfucking skirt like any other day. On my only mildly infuriating drive to work, I'd thought about how the Chicago air would be better for my dry complexion than Gotham's air, and decided that I would need a new moisturizer. I wondered if the painters were done painting the interior of the house a shade called "buttercream." I'd strategically planned how I would go about packing the remaining necessities waiting to be packed.

It'd been such a good day before I'd been shoved around, threatened with gun, knife and fist, and stabbed in the leg.

The Joker clung to the side of the bus with a new wave of hysteria when I looked up at him. The scars protruded grotesquely from the corners of his red mouth, the oily black under his eyes seeping into his crows feet.

I didn't mean to say it, it came out more like a gasp than anything. "You fucking freak."

His laughter cut off sharply, his footsteps scuffed and the body was lifted off of me. I gasped in breath thankfully, only to have the giant's body replaced by The Joker's as he flipped me onto my back and straddled me.

In the ensuing mayhem, I saw the crotch of his brown pants pressed into my navel, his knees, resting near my ribs, strained the fabric of his pants. I could see up his nose, where his white makeup sloppily stopped and his nostrils began. He'd manhandled me in more ways than one that night, but this particular precarious position brought to mind another horrific image. Of another man, with khaki pants instead of brown, with a clean white smile instead of The Joker's yellow, the side of a wedding band pressed into my face instead of The Joker's glove.

Something overtook me. With an outburst that surprised me as much as him, I howled and launched myself upon him, fully knocking The Joker onto his back. I landed one punch to his neck and wound up for a second before the sound of another gunshot nearly stopped my heart.

I was pitched to the side with a twist of The Jokers arm. My head banged against the side of the bus. More gunshots.

I watched in a daze as the clown shielded himself from the raining gunfire against the bus to my left. He pulled a pistol from the waistband of his pants. There were other men flowing out of the warehouse in a steady stream, sticking the barrels of their guns through jagged holes in the windows and firing over my head. _The police found us_ , I realized as oscillating blue and red fell across The Joker's ghostly complexion.

The gunshots seemed to last forever and, in my haze, I feared being shot if I tried to get away. I clutched my head to keep the noise out, but I still heard a clipped, "Let's go, gentlemen!"

The bus bumped against my back as they filed into it. The movement, though slight, seemed to break through the fog in my mind. There were no more men, all of them were either screaming in the bus or bleeding on the ground. I struggled to get vertical and limped to my fullest ability around the back of the bus.

Six policemen out of the twelve pointed their guns at me the second I came into view. I held up my hands shakily and the policemen quickly resumed shooting down the bus. Glass shattered and one form jogged up to me. I was relieved to see it was a female cop that propped me up on her shoulder.

"Get me away from him!" I pleaded with her when my breath finally returned. I struggled to keep my weight off my calf while I clutched her for dear life. She was tall, strong. She practically carried me toward the nearest car.

The policewoman put her mouth to my ear when we were about halfway but before she could speak something bit me hard in the shoulder. I opened my eyes to find myself at eye-level with an flashing blue and red car bumper. I clutched my shoulder and twisted onto my back.

All I could find in the color-saturated mayhem were two black eyes surrounded by lighter blackness. Both eyes were brimming with death, boring into me through the shattered window of a dingy yellow bus.

The eyes were clear, never leaving mine even as the bus rumbled away. Before the bus rounded the street corner, the clown split his red lips and lapped at his scars.

The policewoman helped me stand again as tires screeched and shouts became more distant. She was trying to talk to me. My eyes lingered on the street corner.

"He's gone."

The policewoman was older and beautiful, her skin dark and her eyes earnest as she gripped me tightly. She laid me in the back of a police car and pinched her radio. I let my head fall back onto the headrest as she spoke hasty words into her shoulder.

She arranged me with careful hands so I hunched forward on my thighs. Fingers weighed against my gunshot wound and I would've screamed had my throat not been so raw. "Do you know your name, ma'am?"

"Thank you. He's gone because of you. _He's gone_ ," I whispered to her emphatically. I felt tears welling, drying the back of my throat. I knew I was on the verge of hysteria and some part of me neglected to acknowledge that I was safe.

I could practically see her try to determine if I was going to pass out. "Yes, ma'am, he's gone. What's your name?"

I knew what she was doing, trying to keep my mind off the pain. She pressed a little harder against my shoulder and I gasped through tears, "Blaze Plissken."

"That's a pretty name," she lied, keeping her pressure on my wound. She started to speak again but I cut her off, "How did you find us so fast?"

"There was a 911 call from a gentleman who saw you stumbling down this street. He said you looked hurt. And there was a man with a mask following you, hurting you. And then we got another call, from someone on the force."

"Thank you," I whispered again, more tears running down my face. "He was going to hurt me. He was going to - " nausea scooped through my empty stomach when I considered how close I was to the unthinkable. More sirens crashed around us and new hands helped me up onto a stretcher. My throw up just barely missed the shiny shoes of the EMT. New questions came from new faces and I was unevenly pulled into an ambulance. I was nearing unconsciousness, I knew, but my sense of danger never dimmed. I knew I wasn't answering their questions like I should've, I knew they were trying to help. One of the hands pushed a needle into my arm.

I glared down at it and then up at the EMT shakily. He was young, his face creased with a neutral sort of concern. "I don't want to sleep," my words were already slurring. I blinked and faded into a synthetic rest, a part of my mind still reaching for cognizance.


	5. Simpler

Simpler

I was under The Joker's control for a total of an hour and eight minutes from the moment he walked into Gotham National to the moment he bumbled away in his bus. The days following the robbery and my kidnapping seemed to stagger by, filled with repetitive questions and faces that were not quite sympathetic.

A nurse had to apply an ointment to and change the bandages on my left arm, calf and shoulder three times a day. Three different bandages, two different ointments, one prescription for hydrocodone. Five robbers, three separate interrogation cops. My life was reduced down to numbers, and I couldn't help but sink myself into their careful comfort. Math always been my strong suit, a fact that the police never failed to mention when almost-asking me if I helped orchestrate the robbery.

It didn't take much scratching of my multiple bandages for the cops to back off with the accusations. There was only one badge I was happy to see at my hospital bedside, the only person I wanted period. It had always, ever since we were little, been him.

Things were simpler between Blake and I. When I woke for the first time in the hospital, he had his forehead pressed against the back of my hand. I stroked his knuckle with the tip of my thumb. The movement was as natural as blinking. When we met eyes I could tell he'd been crying.

" _Blaze_ ," he said my name as though he'd been holding it in for hours.

The palm he held felt sweaty. He must've been clutching it for a quite some time. My mouth was thick, numb. I felt a light haze keeping my underlying panic at bay, no doubt due to pharmaceuticals. "Did they catch him?"

His eyebrows knitted heavily together. His eyes were toasted brown, rich and flecked with gold. His hair was cropped short, his jaw was sharp. He had a muted beauty to him and everything from the set of his shoulders to the fold of his hands rang with how sad his soul was. He was always serious, my Blake.

"No, they didn't catch him," his eyes fell from mine and he squeezed my knuckles. He made no other movements to touch me, for which I was thankful. I didn't know if I could handle the look on his face if I'd flinched away.

I sat up and glared around the sea foam tinged cell of a room. I became aware of a heavy beeping to my left as well as a bandage against my arm. The filmy scratch of the cotton on my leg against the thin sheets foreshadowed more bandages on my lower extremities. My pointer finger was pinched in a heart monitoring device, my body covered in a cream-colored smock and a loosely woven blanket. I wondered for a brief moment why I wasn't wracked with pain until I saw the IV jammed into my right arm.

He looked like he might regret what he was about to say and I braced myself, "Blaze, he didn't… Your clothes were all bloody and torn when they found you… I tried to peak at your chart from the nurses but I didn't want…"

Steel fell across my expression. "I wasn't raped again." He bowed his head at my tone, "I wouldn't have let it happen."

He resumed jamming his forehead against the back of my hand. His eyelashes brushed against my wrist. "I know you wouldn't've."

I inspected his slumped shoulders quietly for a few moments, trying to bring myself to reach out and touch him. "Thank you. For answering."

"Why did he let you call? Did he overhear everything?"

"He… just wanted to make me uncomfortable."

He cringed against my hand and stood. He rested a forearm against the windowsill. "I'm sorry. You just woke up. I shouldn't be asking you these things. I shouldn't be here."

I felt bad for smiling in such a somber scenario, but I couldn't help it after seeing his outfit. "You're all sworn in, huh? Can I see the name tag?"

He touched the metallic rectangle on his breast but didn't turn to me. "It says Blake. You know I only let you call me Robin."

I ran my hands through my hair which felt unwashed and became painfully aware of my makeup-less face. "I like 'Robin.' It suits you. I think of you as bright and sharp like a bird."

He cracked a true smile and met my eyes again, "If my name suits me then you should get yours tattooed on your forehead. ' _Blaze Plissken_.' What a name. If there's anyone who acts and looks like a 'Blaze Plissken,' it's you."

I'd always liked the way he thought of me, like I was a superhero or something. I smiled at him and he joined me at my bedside once more. I sought his fingers with mine and he happily obliged.

He looked at me like I was a half-put-together puzzle and he was trying to see what image I would add up to. He was the only person I could think of that looked at my eyes instead of my scar. "You have more freckles than the last time I saw you."

I pushed my hand over my face, only half kidding with my embarrassment, "That's because I'm not wearing any makeup, loser. I'm weak, I never showed you my naked face."

" _Weak_ ," he echoed incredulously before his ears blotched red with anger. Like I said, he was always serious, "You're the strongest person I know. But you don't have to do all of this alone. Blaze, I'm going to find him – "

I wasn't ready for the whole "he done you wrong" speech. It was too reminiscent of a speech from fifteen years ago. "I love you, Blake," his eyes widened, "I love you and you're special to me but I need to be alone right now."

Fingers twitching, he stood, "Can I kiss you?"

Despite myself, a smile came to my lips. I picked at the edge to the bandage on my forearm. "Not right now, not like this. But I will see you again soon."

He squared his jaw but just before he turned away, I snatched his wrist. I cringed at the pain in my forearm and shoulder inspired by the movement. With some effort, I managed to pull his forehead down to rest on mine. I felt a tear hit my thumb where it rested on the corner of his mouth.

"I love you too, Blaze. So fucking much," he seemed reluctant to touch me, scared to hurt me no doubt and before I knew it I pressed my lips to his lightly. His cool breath washed across my Cupid's bow and I smiled.

He lightly shrugged away from me, dusting a kiss on the inside of my wrist as he went. "I'll be back tomorrow and if you still want to be alone, I'll leave again."

His shoes squelched against the flecked pale linoleum as he left. I carefully laid back onto my hospital bed so as to not upset any of my injuries and saw a stack of papers at my bedside. I lifted them to find the most recent issue of my favorite newspaper, The Gotham Observer, with origami folding papers tucked neatly inside. I grinned like an idiot at the doorway Blake had just disappeared through.

Blake and the numbers were the only bearable things about the subsequent week. I begrudgingly informed my new landlord of the necessary aspects of the situation and she agreed that I shouldn't be moving into my new place for another three weeks. I extended my rental agreement for my moving truck, extended my rent at my current apartment for another three weeks, extended my access to utilities and extended my patience to its absolute limit.

They let me stand up after the first day, for which my bladder was thankful. I peered at myself in the mirror in my little bathroom for what felt like ages after the toilet stopped flushing. My hair was long and lank, a far cry from its former fiery majesty. The bags under my eyes sagged something fierce, my lips and thin freckled skin chapped from lack of moisturizer. I looked more papery white than usual and as a result of that and the crying, my eyes shown a muted green instead of their usual hazel. I tried not to look at the bandage over my cheekbone. I was nothing more than a small ghost in the stark overhead lighting.

Me and my sorry ass fluids rack shuffled out of the bathroom after a minute or two. I came face-to-face with one of my several nurses. I'd barely spoken to her other than to compliment the tattoo on her wrist.

It was only my second night at Gotham General Hospital when she helped me into bed and plunked something cool into my right hand. With her tan fingers still sealed over mine and her voice low, she whispered, "The surgeon got this out of your shoulder. Give that bastard hell if you ever see him again."

With that and a light shuffling sound from her mint green scrubs, she left. I opened my fist to find a small cylindrical piece of metal, a bullet, with jagged little somethings engraved in the sides of it. I swallowed and held the bullet closer to my face. I read the message aloud to my dark and empty room in a deadened voice, "Ha, ha, ha."

I saw the next morning that The Joker shot Gordon. What little happiness that Blake provided was yanked away from me. I clutched my bed sheets to my chest and sobbed as the details of my friend and father figure's death fell around me from my shitty wooden-paneled TV, "Lieutenant Gordon was the victim of a fatal gunshot today during a terrorist attack at the funeral procession of Commissioner Loeb. An inside source claims that The Joker released the name of Mayor Garcia as his next victim before the funeral and, as such, Mayor Garcia is suspected to be the intended target of the attack and The Joker is suspected to be the terrorist responsible. Eye witness accounts indicate that Lieutenant Gordon was shot while jumping in front of Mayor Garcia. No official word from law enforcement on how this will effect the manhunt for The Joker."

I occupied myself with folding origami, reminiscing about Gordon with Blake, watching Friends and deciding whether or not I would kill The Joker if I ever saw him again.

* * *

The Joker

I dusted some of the rubble off of the backmost seat of the bus once the cops vanished from sight. The back of the seat was poked clean through with bullet holes, the imploded fabric dragging on my dress shirt as I splayed out. Some of my fellas started to lick their wounds. I watched them and then my knife as I twirled it between my fingers. It was still covered with the girl's blood.

I started to hum. I knew it put my men on edge, which was one of the reasons I was so keen on it.

"Blazey, Blazey, _Blazey_ ," I sung, popping the knife into the air and catching the hilt on the back of my hand. I shook the shoulder of the man nearest me, making him jump and eye me sideways. Dunkin', I thought his name was. "Did you ever see a girl with such _pretty_ hair?"

He winced back down at his palm, somehow shot with a perfect "o" straight through. A bit like the back of my seat. Beads of sweat were evident on his forehead and neck, "Yeah, boss, she was pretty."

I shook his shoulder again hard before I let him go and slipped back into my seat. "You dog, you. Don't get any _ideas_. That little firecracker is _mine_."

My lip curled as I ran a finger down my second favorite blade. Some of her blood was beginning to dry. Were her wounds already being treated? All my good work, erased.

I'd intended to kill her, I really did, when she'd blurted out our location and my name. Right up until then she was exclusively entertainment, and a good bit of it, too. I pulled back though just at the last moment, slicing her face instead of her white throat.

I'd killed a lot more people for a hell of a lot less than what she did, but she served a different purpose. There were minions, entertainers, enemies. Blaze was more than an entertainer, less than an enemy. _A pretty little freckled nuisance_ , I decided, wondering if the pool of gore at my feet was from her calf or from one of my men.

She'd been as weak as she was doomed, pinned between that body and the ground. I'd overreacted, I admit, by killing Tiny. But my temper was short and I couldn't deny myself the opportunity to see her helpless again after such a stunt with the phone call. And she didn't exactly do herself any favors by looking so pitifully little beneath him.

And then she'd said the word "freak" and I felt her purpose momentarily shift. I would've killed her then had she, and the police, not caught me by surprise.

"Is it worse to die or suffer, Dunkin'?" I mused aloud. I nearly laughed when I saw how he flinched as I leaned toward him again sharply. "If those were the only two options, which would you choose?"

He sheered off the end of the duct tape now fastened around his hand with his teeth. His voice was shaky from pain, "I dunno, boss, guess I wouldn't know 'til I'm in the situation."

I pretended to look intrigued before his dumb questioning look sent me over the edge. My stomach nearly split in two I laughed so hard. I gasped between breaths, "What do you know, you're as dumb as the _seat you're sitting on_?!" I peeled out again in laughter. He looked a little hurt so I hooked my elbow around his neck and brought him in close, "Lighten up, Dunkin'. Your little dumb heart is gunna _crack_ in two the way you work yourself up."

He nodded nervously, "Sorry, boss," he mumbled lamely. I lightly slapped his cheek and turned my attention to a long strand of thick orange hair on my pants. I plucked it lightly, tying it tight around the width of my two pointer fingers then snapping it in two.

I brushed the halves into the puddle of blood and said, without moving my eyes from them, "You know how you can make it up to me, Dunkin'?"

His faced me, nervous about my tone and posture. For good reason, he'd been standing mere feet away when I'd killed Tiny, "How?"

The bus chugged to a stop. "Ask our friends at the police station all you can about my redhead. I need a good bit of _fun_."


	6. How & Why We Hid

How & Why We Hid

I spent much of my alone time glaring out of my large window, standing sometimes for hours on end. My calf and shoulder still radiated their own brands of pain but it was manageable. I thought of The Joker and men like him as I watched hospital security shuttles make tired zigzags around the few lingering vehicles.

Within a week of my arrival, I was released from Gotham General . Blake and the hospital insisted on a wheelchair for my release, which I found distinctly embarrassing. Robin all but carried me up my apartment stairs. We shuffled into my bedroom after I wrestled with my keys. My room's walls and floors were varying degrees of white and void of decoration. My mattress and loud comforter were the room's lone titivation save from a phone charger, laptop and similar necessities.

Blake laid me on my cool sheets and I stared up at him. His lips were seamed tightly together. His eyes tried to shield something from me.

"Not big on decorations these days," Blake noted, ears flushing lightly. I realized that I had failed to mention in the few days since our reunion that I was moving to Chicago.

"It didn't seem important to tell you I was moving, I'm sorry."

I could see him pass the very distinct cusp of wanting to argue and wanting to take pity on me, "It doesn't matter right now. Do you need anything?"

Blake brought me moisturizer, two boxes worth of mac and cheese, and my painkillers, in that order. I slipped into the familiar comfort of my sheets with my skin, belly, and pain satiated. He laid down next to me when his work was done. It wasn't until I lightly plucked his wrist and moved it to my good shoulder that he took the cue to wrap his arms around me. He was ever-careful not to touch any of my injuries.

"What's gunna happen to you now, Blaze?" His breath tickled my ear.

He'd delicately danced around the subject of the future and my plight since my first day at the hospital. I traced the veins on the inside of his pale arm with my fingernail to hide my surprise, "I'm going to be ready next time. I'm just so _angry_." I never would've admitted it to anyone else, but Blake had seen parts of me that no one else would ever see and I knew he wouldn't be surprised by this confession.

Foster kids understood each other wholly, sometimes with hardly a glance.

There was a long beat of silence in which he absorbed my words. After some shuffling, he carefully molded my hand around something metallic and familiar. "You still remember how to use it?"

I gripped the handle of the gun hard, putting my finger parallel to the trigger. "Of course I do, you're the one that taught me," I placed the gun lightly in my bag, which rested on the floor. I turned so I could face him. I ran my thumb down the hollow of his cheekbone, "Thank you."

We faded into comfortable silence. Sunlight fell over our necks and faces like a second blanket. As I tried to memorize his illuminated amber eyes, I thought that the moment might've been perfect. I'd cried off and on in the past days, though not as frequently as you would think. Sadness seldom won the fight for space when pitted against my rage.

I think it took the comfort of Blake and my own bed for sadness to finally win. The tears came as I looked at the one person who fully knew my pain and hatred and still looked at me as though I was beautiful.

Both of our parents had died when we were too young to remember. Both of us were raised in foster care and juggled between families for the better part of our existence. He'd tried to kill himself, I'd been raped repeatedly by the patriarch of my third adoptive family. Both of us were angry in our bones at the hand we'd been dealt and both of us knew how and why we needed to hide it.

He didn't try to wipe my tears away or comfort me. He just watched the drops fall with a look of agony, "You're winning."

"Winning what?"

"The catastrophe tally. You're the only person I know who's had more terrible shit happen to them in their lives than me."

I gave dry chuckle and pressed him so close to my body that it hurt. I began to shake with great heaves of my ribs from my forceful sobbing. He squeezed me back just as hard and I welcomed the pain our clutching caused me. Anything was better than the helplessness. I gradually soaked through the collar of Blake's shirt and searched fruitlessly for my runaway anger.

"You're so special to me. I will never love another person the way I love you."

I pressed our foreheads together and gripped his hair with a ferocity that surprised both of us. "I love you so goddamn much."

We sank into a peaceless slumber as we had a million times in our childhood, encased in each other and entirely alone.

* * *

I was semi-awake simply staring at the bandage on my arm for quite some time before I became fully conscious. Blake was gone, replaced with a note scribbled on a bit of old junk mail. I read it in the moonlight, "Hellcat, had to run to work in a hurry, will be back late tonight. Call me if you need anything. I love you."

I lightly touched the indents in his half-cursive handwriting, which turned his y's to g's. When I finally mustered the courage to move upright, I instantly regretted it. The effects of the hydrocodone had worn off completely. My injuries and body revolted against me as I reached my handbag and retrieved a little orange bottle. I dryly popped one more than was recommended and eyed my boxed bandages.

When I started to feel slightly hazy, I moved again to find the painkillers had done their job. I slowly snatched my crutches. I just managed to shift my handbag onto my shoulder and stand when I heard my front door nestle shut. I froze.

"Blake?"

No reply. I glared at my closed bedroom door, straining my ears for any sign of an intruder. I slid my hand into my purse and found the cool metal of Blake's revolver.

"Look, motherfucker, I wouldn't want to mess with me right now!" I clicked back the safety and aimed it for the door.

I felt nothing less than rage that someone would break into my house. _What if it's him?_ I tried to maintain my balance despite the fact that the crutches were a little too high for me.

Again, no reply.

Minutes ticked by and I hardly blinked. There was light shuffling and what I thought to be the sounds of breathing close to my bedroom door.

The doorknob turned and I fired. The shot rang in my ears, cleanly slicing a hole a foot and a half above the doorknob.

The door began to peak slowly open. In the fraction of a second it took for me to squint my eyes, a hunched form collapsed through the front of the door. I stared in shock as the form groaned five feet away, twisting onto its side.

What little that was visible to me of the face was painted a parchment white, the hair messily arranged and hung down limply to the neck. The outfit was plain. A knife rested on the floor.

My hand shook around the gun and I nearly fell off of my crutches.

"You fucking shot me," the man whimpered. His voice was deep, heavily accented, unfamiliar. I finally let my strained arm fall to my crutch so I could heft myself over to the collapsed form.

I nearly vomited, though from horror at having shot someone or relief from not having to look into those eyes again I did not know. There were no Glasglow scars that met me, no deep black irises. The intruder's face was a far cry from The Joker's. The lips were thin, the nose small, the eyes a true blue. But the man's face was still painted in blacks, reds and whites just as The Joker painted his revolting face.

I leveled the gun on the man as he clutched a hole in his abdomen with tan hands. "The Joker sent you." The man spared me half a glance and I was overcome with comfortable rage despite the situation, "Why did he send you?! How does he know where I _live_?!"

He made a pathetic attempt at standing and instantly fell the little vertical distance he managed to gain. The dim moonlight fell on his face and played against the moisture in his eyes and on his forehead, as well as the pained contortion of his face beneath his makeup. "I don't know, lady! Can you fucking call an ambulance or something?!"

" _Shut up_! I already fired off a shot, the cops are already on their way! What else does he know about me?!"

I became distantly aware of sirens drawing nearer. I only had a short amount of time to squeeze as much information out of him as possible. "Answer me, asshole! _You_ broke into _my_ apartment, I can empty the clip and still be within my rights!"

"I just told you! I don't know! A guy came up to me with the job, a wad of cash, and greasepaint! Ugh _fuck_ this hurts. I can't believe you fucking shot me."

The sirens were practically on top of us. I wished I could've kneeled down, pressed the barrel of the gun against the intruder's neck and put the fear of God in him. But my calf throbbed. I settled for glaring at him down my nose, "Well I have a message for The Joker. You tell him that the next clown that comes near me or anyone I love is going to get a bullet in the head instead of the chest."

At last, the man's fearful eyes found me. He was completely at my mercy. I winced at myself for letting a raw sense of power find me.

There was a loud knock at my door. "Gotham Police!"

Never once tearing my gaze from the intruder, I threw my gun onto my bed, leaned against the doorframe and put my hands up. New bodies filtered into my apartment. The barrel of a gun was in my face almost instantly, "Hands up!" a business-like cop voice barked unnecessarily.

A middle-aged cop busied himself with immobilizing me while his partner did the same with the intruder. Once it was made clear that there were no other people in the apartment and we were both unarmed, the preliminary questions started. There were the obvious questions: "What happened?" "What's your name?" "Are you hurt?" "What's with the crutches?" then the more pressing: "Where's the gun you shot him with?" "What's with the clown makeup?" and so forth. I glared at the intruder as he rolled away on his stretcher while I was receiving my line of initial questioning. His makeup stared back at me, a clear message in and of itself.

It didn't take long for the cops to find my unregistered gun and decide that I needed to be taken back to the police station. I was escorted to the back of a cop car, though I was told I was not under arrest. It was short drive to the station and the Gotham night was windy. I pulled my pajama shorts down my legs uncomfortably. They hadn't given me an opportunity to change my clothes or my bandages.

There was a sense of terseness to the men and women working that day, a sense of barely-concealed panic. I divided my time between looking for Blake and trying to tune into conversations as I was being accompanied to my interrogation room. The walk took a fair amount of time on my crutches. They were still a little too tall for me.

"…bet that sick bastard has killed six cops…," "…he was antagonizing Ramirez on the ride…," "he had seventeen knives in his pockets and only those…"

They'd sat me in one of the many sterile interrogation rooms and let me sip on a thin cup of instant coffee. I thought the Gotham police force might've tired of me by now, what with my many runaway attempts as a child, my rape, my abduction and now a robbery.

My back ached I'd been waiting in the cold metal chair so long. The overhead lights were dim and I thought I might fade into sleep if they left me there much longer. I hadn't thought to check the time on the way and my phone wasn't in my handbag as I suspected. But I could tell by the looks of others it was late.

"Blaze," a deep voice snapped. I looked up to find I'd dozed off and Blake was grabbing my crutches. "We're going to have to contact you another day to get your statement."

Something was wrong, his voice was brief where it seldom was with me, his motions hurried and fumbling. He was in street clothes rather than his police uniform, though his gun was poignantly strapped to his hip. I stiffly stood in confusion, still half asleep and hazy from the painkillers, "What's wrong?"

His eyes didn't even have time to find me as he ushered me toward the still-open door. "You shouldn't be here. Not now."

 _That isn't an answer._ It occurred to me that I might not want to know the answer.

I concentrated on moving as fast as I could toward the lobby, stilting through the overly-brown desks and chairs of the police filing paperwork. Blake had his hand on my lower back. When I looked back at him, he seemed to be on the verge of picking me up and carrying me the rest of the way he was so impatient.

We were about halfway through the room when the commotion began. I felt and saw Blake's muscles lock up. I moved to look behind me to see what the choruses of "Put the weapon down!" were regarding. Blake blocked my view as he turned and pointed his gun at the source of the upheaval.

"Keep _moving_ ," he instructed brusquely over his shoulder, his voice reaching me desperately over the panic.

"Just shoot him!" another voice sliced through as I moved with renewed vigor toward the door.

"What do you want?!"

I'd only gotten a couple steps when I heard him. A part of me knew that _he_ was the source of their panic. I wasn't stupid. What else could've caused Blake to spring me in a panic? I'd seen the headlines on the news when I was still hospitalized: "Joker Slashes through Wayne Fundraiser" and "Joker Attempts Hit on Mayor, Kills Lt. Gordon."

The Joker had been on the police's radar for quite some time. But never would I have imagined he would get caught. Never tonight, while I just so-happened to be in the police station.

"I just want my phone call."

I stopped for a moment. There was no mistaking that voice. My pause was momentary and I did not look back for fear that he would find my face in the sea of faces. I hadn't planned for this.

There was more scuffling among the police, but the screams had died down. I moved with a great urgency for the door, twenty feet away now. I prayed to a God I didn't believe in that he hadn't seen me yet.

I passed the last of the desks when I found myself unceremoniously tossed to the floor. My ears rang and a delicate haze blanketed my thoughts and movements. Papers fluttered around me. I was in unbelievable pain, as I'd somehow managed to fall on all of my injured areas. My moans mingled with those of the police around me.

I looked back to find two brown shoes with ridiculously patterned socks attached at the ankles stepping over Blake's unmoving form toward me.

"Blake!" I accidentally said aloud. I should've played dead – I had no way of knowing if The Joker actually saw me or not, he may've just been going for the exit – but in that moment I only knew my panic.

Blake remained still and The Joker was so, so close.

"Oh, come _on_ , prin _cessss_ ," he squatted down deliberately slow. He was dressed in greens and purples, his makeup faded almost completely off in some places. His chin was low, his grin knowing, his eyes ever-black. I reached for my crutch – anything to hit him with before he surely killed me – but he shoved it away with a flick of his wrist and a loud grating sound.

I put my head down on my arm so I wouldn't have to look at him with tears of frustration in my eyes. My every cell was vibrating with rage and pain. I winced when I felt his long nails drag through my hair. "What a _silly_ coincidence finding you here. Either you're – _uh_ – stal _king_ me or this is fate- _tah_."

I said the words into my elbow as soon as I realized them, "You knew I had a gun. You knew I would shoot him if he broke in. You wanted me to be here."

" _Ooooooo_ ," he cooed, patting me on my ruined shoulder as if impressed. My whole body jolted at the pain and I twisted my face to him with a glare that would shame the devil, "Aren't you a smart little birdy? A birdy with a broken _wing_ ," he growled the last word with unexpected ferocity and ensnared my hair in his fingers.

"I'm gunna see if I can't make you _sing_."


	7. Jaws

Jaws

The Joker yanked me up by my hair so I could look into his eyes. His pretense was dissolved. He was no longer looking at his plaything, he was looking at someone who gravely inconvenienced him. My scalp seared.

"Fuck you," I mustered. I may have been caught by surprise but that didn't mean I couldn't put up a fight.

His laugh was low, predatory before he tilted his head and slid his eyes from side to side, "You should plan on doing exactly that. _Speaking_ of which, another little birdy told me you have – uh – a _taste_ for pork." He laughed at his own joke piercingly while I paled. He'd somehow managed to roll in a sexual innuendo and reveal that he knew about Blake in one fell swoop. _But does he know Blake is three feet away?_

"You should see your _face_ ," his breath washed across my face as he chuckled, vile and stinking. "Don't _worry_ , I won't kill your beau tonight, I have other plans for him. But for now…"

He punched me with all of his strength and hefted me hard onto his shoulder. I collided with the nape of his neck and nearly vomited from the agony at the violent and abrupt movement. He ripped the bandage from my calf wound and dug his index finger into the hole there. I screamed louder than I think I ever have. Consciousness began to feel unreal as he hauled me back toward the cells.

 _Why would he want to go back into the cells? And how the fuck did he get explosives into a police station?_

I faded in and out of consciousness, catching only glimpses and slivers of conversations. There was another man with us who'd come willingly. The Joker and him exchanged curt words, but the man didn't seem overly concerned with the apparently unconscious woman slung over The Joker's shoulder.

I was roused when I heard him. Blake's strained voice gasped out to me, saying my name, and breathed a sigh when I stirred. I strained my neck to see that The Joker had stepped over Blake again on his way to the exit. He was barely conscious, his fingers sought something among the shattered glass and papers surrounding him. There was a deep cut intersecting his eyebrow, but his voice was strong, "Let her go, you _fuck_! Take me! I'm the one who told the police about the warehouse! _JOKER_!" The Joker's step didn't even falter.

I mumbled his name against The Joker's shirt and woke fully again when I was placed upright. This time, I fought. I was being put into a seat, and The Joker's hands reached to move my legs so he could close the door. I yanked his hand hard, aided by the element of surprise, and he slapped his chin on the top of the doorframe. I kicked him away, but landed on top of him when I tried to get out of the car.

He was up in a flurry, scooping me up like furious adult would pick up a child. He quite literally threw me into the backseat of a police car. He pinned me down by my throat and licked the blood trailing down his chin. His voice was a perverse growl and I couldn't ignore the vile position we'd landed in with his stomach between my legs, "Oh, I'm going to have _fun_ with you."

His hand cut off my windpipe for a moment more and I felt my face pound with stopped up blood. I dug my fingernails into his wrist and kicked madly at him before he released me and quickly snapped the door shut.

I rattled the door handle violently, banging on the window as I watched him skip around the driver's side. The man, to whom I assumed the earlier voice belonged, was already seated in the passenger's side behind a thin metal grate.

"Please, you have to help me, he's going to hurt me," I whispered urgently to him when my ministrations at the door failed. He turned his face toward his window and squeezed his eyes shut. I banged hard against the grate, "You _coward_!"

The Joker fell into the driver's seat with a flourish, reverting back to his taunting self, "Now, now, little bird. We've already talked about you embarrassing me in front of my friends." He found me out of the corner of his dark eye before he began driving.

"You can't take me. _You can't take me_! Let me go! LET ME GO, JOKER!" I rattled my cage again and began trying to kick my way out of the back with my good leg. I was absolutely hysterical.

"I love it when you say my name."

I positively howled with frustration. I'd moved past words, simply grunting as I thrashed about. My injuries were momentarily numbed, or perhaps just lost in the fires of horror within.

The Joker rolled his eyes and taunted more to me than to the man, "She'll tire herself out eventually," before he slid his window open and slipped his face and neck out of it. The wind blew his lank hair out behind him. I screamed through the open window, but the streets were deserted. The clock on the dash read in blocky blue letters. "4:32 a.m."

Logic and pain found me suddenly and simultaneously. I stopped struggling so I could clutch my wounds and conserve my energy.

I watched the streets diligently, in search of souls that I could call out to. I had plenty of time to contemplate my misfortune but I dodged that particular train of thought in favor of one more expedient. The Joker was not invincible, he was fleshy and woundable and, to my knowledge, unarmed. I would make it my primary objective to shed as much of his blood as I could even if it meant I couldn't get away.

"Alright, sweetling," the bastard chirped, lurching the car into park. The Joker and the chicken-shit passenger both got out.

Another form materialized at my door and I threw myself against the opposite side of the car. I cocked my good foot back, ready to strike when what I suspected to be one of Joker's clowns tried to pry me from the backseat.

Instead, the door to my back popped open, arms hooked under my armpits and I was assisted into a solid fall on my ass. The Joker mockingly pouted down at me.

"I was going to wait until we got inside to start messing with you but you're just giving me so many oppor _tun_ ities."

I forced myself not to wince as I stood. The man who'd come to window came up behind me, ready to pounce if I made a move. I just scowled. My every instinct told me to run but I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me try to limp away a foot a minute.

"Let me go."

The Joker made a low sound of satisfaction in his throat. He eyed me up from my Converse to my bun. Slow steps took him in a circle around me and I resisted the urge to pull down my shorts, to cross my arms over my chest. I would not let him know he was making me uncomfortable. I rotated so I could face him as he orbited me. My nails bit into my palms hard from the pain in my leg.

When he'd made a full loop his drawling feet scratched to a stop. The Joker waved away his henchman with a twist of his fingers.

My rage was like a physical entity, standing there with us.

He stuck his hand up near my face when I made it clear I would not be the one to speak first. On instinct, I faltered a step back from his hand and clenched my jaw when my bad foot landed. His fingers continued to seek my hair. I slapped them away.

He leisurely smacked his lips and tilted his mouth in a chastising grin. "Now, you aren't a _fraid_ of me are you, beautiful?"

"Try disgusted."

He frowned and nodded as if impressed before he slyly stepped toward me. We were practically chest to chest. He leaned down toward my ear and his stench filled my nostrils.

"I know what gave you your scars, Plissken. Wanna know what gave me mine?"

I gave him a great shove, and finally broke his gaze so he couldn't see the tears that his words invited. I tried to keep my voice unyielding, " _Enough_! It won't take long for the cops to find us! Let me go!"

He twisted his arms behind his back and hunched forward, on the verge of glee at my obvious distress. "Oh, I'm not sure about that. They _are_ probably mostly dead from the explosion. The other half belong to me or the mob. Are you hoping that boyfriend of yours will swoop in, give me a heroic punch and pick you up as he jogs into the sunset?"

"Stop talking about him!"

His red lips peeled back to expose his piss-yellow teeth, "Does he know about your little _se_ cret? Does he know what _daddy_ did to you?"

I was literally blinded as I launched myself upon him. He was braced for it, cackling madly as he dodged to the side and ensnared me in his arms from behind. I tried to wretch up my feet so I could kick us back from the wall but he pressed me against the wall before I could. He stopped cackling to snap his jaws mockingly in my ear. "Oh, touchy, touch _-y_ , Blaze. Be careful or I might get some _ideas_ about what makes you tick- _kah_."

I glared at the brick wall in front of me, my chest heaving. My tears and trembling, both from fury and pain, had reached a disconcerting level. But at least my voice was low and lethal, "I'm going to kill you."

His suffocating hold turned into an embrace and his B.O. suffocated me. The rough spines of his hips dug into my back. His lean arms were iron bars around me, his wide chest stifling me. " _That_ fire is why I took you."

He guffawed wildly again, wrestling me toward the door to the warehouse. _This is it. I'll never get away from him._ "NO!" I shrieked again, making as much noise as I possibly could while being physically carried to the door. One of his henchman pulled it ajar for us.

There was a gunshot and the man holding the door open clutched his arm, letting the door slam shut. To his credit, The Joker reacted without missing a beat. He twisted me around, arm tight around my collarbone as the screams of the injured man fell around us.

My struggles came to an abrupt end as I took in the shooter, his feet set wide and shoulders squared despite the hand pressed to his bloody head. Blake looked unsteadily on his feet, his police-issued gun quivering in his hand. Blood soaked down into his right eye and through the collar of his white shirt. His eyes were in pure agony, seeking mine desperately. His gaze narrowed with rage as he took in the bruise I felt pounding on my jaw from where The Joker punched me.

A great and heavy dread flowed through me. _Not him, not my Blake._ "Gotham PD! Release the hostage and put your hands up!"

I paled, mouthing his name soundlessly. There was a snap and I felt the knife press to my neck. The Joker swayed us from side to side provokingly and spoke to Blake over my shoulder. "Ohhh, _authoritative_. I can see why Blaze likes you so much. I _thought_ I saw you following us, I just didn't think anyone would be stupid enough."

 _Not my Blake, not my Blake._

I knew I was making a mistake before I did it, but I couldn't keep the pleas from falling in a hurried whisper, "Please don't hurt him, I'll go with you." The Joker peered down at me from the corner of his eye with an arched brow as though I just said I could fly.

"Let her go, Joker!"

The Joker returned his attention to Blake. The Joker pressed me hard against him and I perversely felt him rub his groin into my back. It felt so wrong meeting gazes with Blake. "But if I let her go, I wouldn't have two little birds to play with. One with a broken wing and a _robin_!"

"I will fucking shoot you!"

The ends of The Joker's hair tickled my face as he exaggeratedly looked behind him. "Did you mean to shoot me _before_? _Some_ thing tells me all that blood loss is affecting your _aim_."

Blake's voice was breaking from near-hysteria, but he sounded more frightening than I'd ever heard him, "You brought a knife to a gun fight and if any harm comes to her you'll be _dead_ before you hit the _ground_! Let her go!"

" _Oh, sure_. Why don't you just drop the gun and come grab her yourself?"

"You don't have something better to do than terrorize her? You won't kill her, you would've by now so _what_ is the point?!"

The Joker lapped at his lips and administered a quick kiss to my cheek. I cringed away only to have the blade bite into my neck. "I'm a busy man, Roby. But even busy men need _hobbies_."

Blake's lips turned white as he absorbed The Joker's insinuation and I wanted to scream. It was one thing for The Joker to torture me, but I would not stand idly by while The Joker tortured Blake.

I twisted into motion, throwing my elbow back twice into his ribs and stepping on his foot. The Joker released me intentionally, letting me stumble hardly a step before snatching my wrist and pulling me so I could face him.

I heard Blake stagger a step forward but The Joker stopped him with a short, "At ta ta ta," and a flourish putting his blade to my neck again. The Joker was taunting him, overpowering me in front of him just so he could watch him squirm.

 _How can someone be so cruel?_

The Joker bit his lip, splaying his long fingers at the small of my back and pinning me to him. His eyes bored tauntingly into Blake's over my head, "But you're right, piggy. I _probably_ won't kill her tonight. And I _already_ promised not to kill you tonight. But that doesn't mean I can't give her a couple more scars to whine about does it?" He tapped the knife to the corner of my mouth. I glared up at him but didn't dare move. "Drop the gun, lover boy."

Blake was at a loss for words. I could feel his apprehension to my back and I wanted nothing more than to wrap him in my arms and free him of having to make this decision.

Only a brief beat had passed, however, before there was another booming gunshot. A body hit the floor behind me.


	8. Funny Games

Funny Games

The Joker scoffed, throwing me to the ground by Blake with a violent twist.

I fell on my ruined shoulder. I never thought I'd be happy to hear Blake's screams mingle with mine, assuring me that he was not dead.

The Joker addressed the smoking rifle protruding from one of the warehouse's broken window, "You party pooper! I wanted to see if I could give the kid a _nosebleed_ from thinking too hard!"

"Blake!" I jammed my hand down on Blake's damaged thigh, trying to keep the blood inside of him. His eyes were rolling back in his head, his lips chalky and white. I grasped at his face though he was entirely unresponsive. He was in shock, the back of his head and back digging into the filthy cement as he arched his back.

The Joker bounced down to rest on his heels to my left as I tried to rouse Blake, "He looks bad, Blazey. Think he'll _make_ it?"

I tried to appear as though I hadn't heard him, as though I was still entirely occupied by Blake. I repositioned my hand so it was closer to Blake's gun, which rested just barely hidden from The Joker's view to my right. "You better hope he _does_ die, princess. If he doesn't, I might just be tempted to make him _wish_ he had-dah."

My fingers found the metal of the gun handle, still clammy and warm from Blake's hand. I peeked down to check that the safety was already clicked down. When I looked back up at Blake, there was a knife to his neck.

"Nice try, red. Push the gun away from you."

I clenched my jaw when I looked up at The Joker. He was watching me with a great fascination as my eyes flicked between Blake, him, and the knife. Blake was still barely conscious.

"You said you wouldn't kill him."

"And _I_ wouldn't," his high, nasally voice assured earnestly, almost offended that I would expect as much of him. He tilted his head from side to side in false contemplation, "You can think of this blade as being in your hands right now, cupcake. You make one more _twitch_ toward me with that gun and you're as much of a cold-blooded _murder_ er as I am."

I shoved away the gun with a gritty grating sound and I immediately shot upward so I was standing. The Joker did the same. His mouth was part grin and part snarl as we glared at each other, his uneven scars seeming to pull all of the way up his grizzly face. His body was vibrating with pleasure at having someone to dangle in front of me.

"I'll go with you if you let him go free."

He looked genuinely surprised for a sliver of a moment. He almost instantly resumed his ridiculous façade and revolved abruptly so we were standing shoulder-to-shoulder. He slung his arm around my neck. When I tried to shrug him off there was a blade to my ribs. I stared down through teary eyes at Blake as The Joker spoke into my ear with what I imagined to be his natural voice, though his tone made me quake slightly, "And what makes you _think_ I want you to come _willingly_?"

He snatched the back of my neck with a hard grip and forced me toward the door the warehouse again. "Grab him!"

I fought him blindly, "No! NO! _Blake_!"

Men filtered out of the door. I saw their shoes and The Joker's hand dramatically usher them outside as he cordially moved us to the side. The Joker wouldn't let me turn my head to look at Blake as we entered his warehouse. I continued to shriek Blake's name long after the door sealed behind us.

He hauled my screaming form further into the large, thinly lit room. We were headed distinctly toward an open door at the opposite end of the warehouse.

When we were feet from the door, I managed to push myself off from his thigh and break his hold around my neck with a wild lurch. I turned and hit his instep hard before aiming the heel of my hand upward to his nose. My hit landed solidly and he fell with a huff.

This time blood was my mission rather than escape. I flung two vicious kicks at his ribs with a feral yell. He grunted and hunched over at every hit, though found time to cackle between groans.

"You can't _possibly_ be," he groaned loudly when I hit him in the crotch, and his voice was as mocking as ever, "using all of your strength."

I saw red, both from his comment and the screams of Blake to my back. "Do you ever _shut the fuck up_?!" I mounted him and wrapped my hands as hard as I could around his wiry throat. "I'll kill you for what you did to him! _I'll fucking kill you_!"

I banged his head against the cement when he didn't even try to push me off of him. My strangling seemed to barely have an effect on him. He stretched his neck as though he was wearing a tight necklace though his black eyes were tearing.

My hands began to shake with exertion after hardly fifteen seconds. I took one hand off of his neck and started rooting around for his knife on the floor, "It's in my front pocket, princess. Strapped to my inner _thigh_ ," he jerked his hips into mine pointedly at that last word and wiggled his eyebrows.

I launched myself off of him with disgust. He snatched my ankle as I tried to regain my balance. I smacked to the ground when he yanked and then he was dragging me the remaining distance to the door.

"Happy, he goes in here too!"

Blake's screams drew closer. My baggy black shirt dragged up my midsection as I was tugged. I tried to kick him, but my free foot was connected to my damaged leg and my stomach curled when I struck him with it. The cement beneath me became ceramic tile when I bumped over the room's threshold. He skidded me across the floor and my ribs collided with the wall opposite the door. I was in a filthy bathroom, equipped with a single toilet, a rusted mirror and a small sink. The walls and floors were once-white tile.

When I tried to stand, The Joker shoved me down. I looked up at him through my eyebrows, and then at the door when two men carrying Blake shuffled in. Blake had stopped screaming, though he was still mostly conscious. The one holding Blake under his armpits didn't even bother looking at me, while the man holding Blake's legs couldn't seem to tear his gaze away from me.

They placed him on the closed lid of the toilet and wasted no time in securing both of his wrists to a pipe with a long leather belt. He fought, though the color was still entirely drained of his face and neck and his fight was feeble. He mostly just scowled at The Joker's back. There was a light trickling as some of his blood fell to the floor.

"You can leave," The Joker informed the two men. They complied wordlessly, though the one who held Blake's legs, the taller of the two, sought my eyes as he pulled the door shut behind him.

So it was just Blake, The Joker and I in a bathroom. The space was suffocating both in size, smell and situation. Mine and Blake's ragged breath was the only sound for what felt like a full minute.

" _Soooo_ ," The Joker drawled in mock-awkwardness. "You're probably wondering why I've _gathered_ you all here _today_."

My voice was a bark, "Because you're crazy?"

Deep black impaled me as The Joker sucked his teeth. All traces of humor were gone from his voice, " _No_ , I'm not. I'm _not-tah_."

He shook out his knuckles and tilted his head to the side in apparent deep contemplation. I thought for sure he would hit me again. Instead, he twisted around to Blake exuberantly and re-cuffed his octagonal-patterned purple sleeves. Much to my disbelief, he sat himself squarely on Blake's lap while facing me. Blake glared at him as though the intensity of his gaze alone could set The Joker aflame. I would've been tempted to laugh had the situation not been so grim.

The Joker jabbed a tan finger at me, addressing Blake, "That's some girl you got there, you know that? Beautiful, got a brain like Einstein, so brave it borderlines on being plain _stupid_. There's not a person in the whole wide _world_ who's gotten to call me a 'freak' or 'crazy' and lived to tell about it. _Say_ ," he strolled heel-to-toe toward me, fingers intertwined at his front, "you're good with math, aren't you, cupcake? How many times have you called me either one of those?"

I didn't answer. Something told me he didn't need my encouragement to continue. There was an unbelievable dread in my very marrow. He leaned forward attentively, cocking an eyebrow. He shot up and erected a finger as suddenly as if I'd answered.

"Correct! _Twice_! That makes you _double_ as lucky as the rest of those clowns. So you see why I _kinda_ have to even the score don't you? I mean, you do something that really hurts me personally, it's only fair that I return the _favor_."

I just stared at him stupidly when his feet stopped inches away from my folded knees. I had a feeling his train of thought would _eventually_ come to a head though if it was going to be any time soon I had no idea.

"And you're gunna get even luckier, little bird, because _I'm_ going to let you, mmmm shall we say, _pick your poison_. We're gunna play a _little_ game, all three of us. It's called, 'Peep.'"

He surprised me by quickly snatching my hair and forcing me to stand. He tied each of my wrists to a pipe extending from the sink with a belt the men had left at Blake's feet. He positioned my flailing from so I was quite literally seated in the damp sink. Blake's eyes were wide, furious, his entire neck and face flushed bright red with anger at how The Joker manhandled me. His shoulders hunched forward to pull against his restraints.

The Joker's strong stomach moved to block him from my view. The Joker slouched so his hand rested on the mirror behind my head. His hips pressed into my knees which were folded over the ceramic edge of the sink.

"You wanna know why it's called Peep?" he nodded at me as if to say, 'of course you do, it'll make you feel better.' He continued, "'Cause if you _make_ a peep, little Robin get his wings _clip_ ped."

My insides turned cold as I met his gaze with surprise. " _What_?"

The Joker's finger intersected my lips. I would've moved away had I not been momentarily rooted to the spot with dread at the look of pure elation in The Joker's eyes, "I'll let that one slide. But since you like saying _such_ _hurt_ ful things, the only thing I require of those pretty scarred lips is silence. Your beau will thank you."

His eyes were gauging mine, low and excited, to assure that I understood. And of course, I did. He was going to torture me, through body, mind, and soul. He couldn't've been fibbing earlier, he knew what my adoptive father did to me, why I was scarred, and why I reacted so to his sexual innuendos. It was pouring salt into the wound that he would violate me in front of the only person I truly cared about and force me to be silent the whole time. Of course he would make me choose between my love for Blake and my desire not to be raped. Of course.

"Please," I mouthed. I started to shake. His grin pierced me hungrily as he gulped in my reaction to his proposition.

I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and pressed the crown of my head to the mirror at my back to try to get a hold of myself. I tried to think of a way out of the situation. I could scream and fight with all I had in me and risk Blake's skin or I could remain docile and quiet as The Joker no doubt did his worst as Blake watched. Both options would kill a piece of me, of that I had no doubt.

My eyes being shut only amplified the light pressure The Joker exerted as he ran his fingers from my ruined calf to my knee, the darkness only amplified Blake's shouts, "Don't fucking touch her! You motherfucker! I will skin you! Fuck!"

The Joker's breath washed hotly across my neck. I shivered as though I'd been submerged in an ice bath, feeling the pads of my fingers slippery with sweat as they pricked my palms.

 _This is hell, this is hell, this is hell_.

As I felt The Joker stroke my outer thighs, I wished I'd let my manager die before me. As I felt him trying to dip into the cleavage between my two thighs, I wished I'd died the night my adoptive father had beat me up and sliced open my mouth.

I crossed my ankles tightly together to otherwise occupy my mind. My very soul screamed at me to pry his hand away from me. I strained against the bonds until I felt something brush my exposed neck. His lips.

I swallowed my scream of disgust but could not hold back my kick, for which I knew I'd suffer. The Joker stumbled back and I scowled at him, my chest heaving. His Glasglow grin belonged to a shark. I forced myself to maintain his gaze despite my copious trembling, a result of my restraint and my fear.

His tone was light, though his eyes dark with lust and chaos, "Oh, a _loop_ hole. I never said not to fight back. How pre _dict_ able of you." Before I could blink, he twisted and backhanded Blake so hard his head banged into the wall.

"Stop!"

The Joker rushed to me emphatically, as though I was a crying child. He cradled my face almost lovingly, his eyebrows knitted together with false concerned, "Oh, I will, cupcake, I _will_. He doesn't have to get hurt anymore. You know what you have to do."

I wanted to howl in frustration, though Blake was screaming enough for the both of us. Godless insults fell out of him as The Joker started in on me again, his eyes boring into mine. I pressed my lips together, painfully aware of Blake's pitying gaze on me.

The fingers of his right hand found my waist and walked up my ribs. He kept one hand cradling my cheek, brushing the sweat away from my forehead with his thumb. Tears finally fell when he suddenly and savagely laid his lips on mine.

If I thought the smell of the greasepaint slathered on his skin was suffocating, I nearly retched at the taste. I took a couple startled moments to think beyond my thick revulsion and aim a hardy kick to his groin out of pure instinct.

The momentum, however, of the strike was lost as he twisted my knee between his thighs and curled his vile tongue under my upper lip, hooking and pulling it toward him.

This ushered the end of my self-control. I twisted and tried to scream out from under him. He, seeming in my increasingly vulnerable state to be a giant of sorts, apparently swallowed me with his body. His arms trapped my head flush against the mirror.

When he finally wretched his face a precious couple inches away from mine, I could hardly believe only a few seconds had passed. He snatched my jaw with a sweaty hand. I met his eyes after a moment of forcing clean air into my lungs with an air of violent defiance. I struggled still in his hold, trying to wretch my knee from him and he groaned.

 _He fucking groaned_ , I thought with an air of disbelief. I looked down to see my knee brushed against his manhood, painfully visible in his purple trousers.

It physically exhausted me I put so much effort into not screaming. The Joker's dark, black rimmed gaze pierced me over his eyebrows as he snarled and released my knee only to savagely arch my hips with his hands. He tried to pry my knees open. I grunted lowly as I tried to press my body back into the sink and keep my ankles crossed. My legs were still strong from years of running but The Joker was entirely unhinged. His nails dug into the skin between my knees but my resistance was bolstered by the chorus of Blake's screams.

The Joker cooled himself enough to heft a growl at my resistance. He snatched my neck with one hand and then, without warning, jammed his index finger down to the knuckle into my calf wound. He wrenched my leg to the side with a violent twist using my wound like a handle.

The end of my scream fell around me before I even realized I'd released it. I never felt such agony. He'd jammed his finger into my wound earlier that night, but that was a surface brush compared to this. He cricked his finger out after only a moment and I screamed again at the feeling of it leaving my calf.

I was near unconsciousness from stress and pain. But I was conscious enough to feel him practically toss my calf down and thunder over to Blake. I had screamed, after all. The Joker snapped out his knife and quickly sliced the top of Blake's previously undamaged thigh. He cackled madly when Blake's screams reached a new height. A new stream of blood began to trickle onto the floor, and each drop seemed to boom in my ears as if to chastise me.

"I'm sorry," I mouthed to him. I was openly sobbing now. The anger inside of me was there, but hidden deep within. A familiar face sunken into a thick crowd.

I tried to hide my fear as The Joker stalked toward me again, "I don't know how much more of this he can _take_ , Blazey."

He pressed his hips between my knees before I could even start to close them again. His fingers ran up my thighs, tracing along the open claw marks from his nails. He swirled my blood wetly up my legs, inching ever-closer to my waist. I gritted my teeth, some of my anger finding me again. I pictured my adoptive father's close-trimmed nails, his pale fingers ringed with a thin silver wedding band running up the same path on my legs before they were strong from running.

The Joker saw my fear vanish in place of anger and as if he could read my mind, he interjected over Blake's cries, "Bringing back any memories of your family dinners, Blazey? Did your daddy insist you sat next to him at dinner so he could do this to you under the table?" his fingernails dug into the area just below where my shorts sat. I was proud of myself for not even so much as cringing. "Did Mommy #3 make you pie to eat for dessert? What did your _daddy_ eat? _You_?"

I let out a ragged breath, my face flushing hot with the unmet need to strike him.

 _This is my hell._


	9. Venom & Peaches

Venom & Peaches

His horrible tongue slithered out from his lips to lap at his red paint between kisses to my throat, incurring a wet smacking sound. I cringed, looking toward the ceiling when I saw one of my tears fall onto his greasy head. I loathed the warped intimacy, the terrible fine details, that assured me that the image in front of me was real. His hair tickling my chin, the sound of skin over skin, fabric over fabric. These were things meant for two willing lovers, barred by logic from a rapist and his victim. And yet there I sat, forcing myself into silence as I promised myself I never would again.

He saw me drifting. His black voice clawed me back from the abyss. "I wonder who would win a peach pie eating contest, Blazey? Me or your old man? Did he ever make you _cream_?" He clutched me through the front of my shorts savagely at the last word, clenching his fingers to their fullest extent. Though he grabbed me through my shorts and underwear, I felt his middle finger dip slightly into me. His gruesome face was inches from mine.

My mouth fell open with pain and my face burned. I arched away, biting through the skin of my bottom lip with the effort it required not to scream. I would not let Blake be injured further. I knew The Joker was provoking me, trying to make me choose my dignity over Blake's wellbeing. But as I heard Blake sob for the first time since we were children, I chose Blake's wellbeing over my dignity abruptly and without regret.

His clenched his fingers so hard I thought I heard his knuckles creak, assuring that I would not fade off, I would feel everything he did to me.

"You fucking animal!" Blake howled, his voice breaking, "Leave her alone!"

"What _fun_ would that be?" The Joker snarled gravelly, mostly to himself. There was a wildness to him. His eyes saw me as something laying there to be toyed with. He was marveling my distress, absolutely drowning himself in his power over me. He pecked the side of my neck lightly. He drew up face up so he could smile a shark's smile at me and then he bit down hard on my neck. His claw was removed from the front of my shorts so he could quickly slice through my shirt. I felt his jaws twist to my break my skin.

I was only partially aware that I was left with my oversized shirt as hardly a vest hanging over my exposed bra and midsection. I slid my eyes past The Joker's greasy green head to Blake. He could only stare at me for a couple seconds, tears and blood in his eyes as The Joker mauled my jaw and neck and clawed at my stomach and back with sharp nails.

It was only a matter of time before The Joker would see the scars embellishing my abdomen and Blake and I knew it. Blake's blood was a full circle around the base of the toilet and nearly blinded him in the eye closest to me. The fight was fading from him though it was not quite gone yet.

"I won't let you do this, Blaze. Fight him! _FIGHT HIM_!"

I shook my head.

"I can take it. He can't do shit to me. He's a fucking _freak_!"

The Joker drew back from me, his intent obviously to punish Blake. But then he caught sight of my scars. A touch of control fell back across his feral eyes as he inspected my front. His finger tucked back one side of my shirt to expose the three small parallel scars lining the protrusions of my three bottommost ribs. His hand trailed lower toward the longer, more deliberate scar in the hollow of my right hipbone. The scars were less noticeable than the scar on my mouth, but they were still hard to miss.

His fingers were curious rather than groping as they trailed down another angry pink line intersecting my sternum. "My, my, Blazey. Aren't _we_ damaged goods?"

I just looked at my Robin without seeing him, choosing to remember when he saw all of my scars for the first time. We had been kids, somewhere between teenagers and children. My adoptive family had returned me to the foster home two months after I was signed over to them like I was a lamp that didn't work properly. In truth, I just had just fallen comatose after my second rape. It was Robin who'd called the cops when he saw the blood seep through my white shirt. He'd made me agree to take my shirt off. It was my Robin who watched me sob as I wedged my half-naked form between my desk and my closet. He held me while we waited for the police to come.

Only Robin, my adoptive father, my doctor, and a female member of the police department had ever seen my scars. Until now.

The Joker cupped my cheek with a damp palm and I scowled at him. I shook violently with Blake no longer in my line of sight. "Daddy done you _good_ , sweetling. You'd think as someone who played Peep before, you would be _better_ at it."

A realization struck The Joker and his gaze took on a new hunger. A fresh wave of dread consumed me. I knew where his train of thought would take him. "I'll just bet Mr. McCreery was a _thorough_ man," his fingers found the hem of my shorts.

"He didn't scar her down there!"

The Joker froze, seeming to abruptly remember that Blake was in the room. He smiled contemplatively down at me, eyes narrowed as if weighting his options. His hands were still half-down the sides of my shorts. He tilted his head down and for a moment I thought he would try to bite or kiss my neck again. Instead, he rested his forehead against my quivering shoulder before he spoke to Blake in his nasally high voice, "Does it _kill_ you to know she'll never trust another man again? Even if she lets you fuck her, even if she says she _loves_ you, she'll, if only for a moment, always think of him when she's with you."

Blake stared at the floor. I sought his eyes over The Joker's shoulder to no avail. The moment I'd registered that The Joker seemed to have broken himself out of his lustful state he returned to it. He snatched the back of my neck and pressed our lips together to redirect my attention to him, "It's going to be easier breaking you than I thought."

I cringed and pressed back against his hand. His nails dug into the back of my neck to keep me still. My calf was throbbing sharply. I could feel the back of my thighs, forehead and shoulders slick with sweat. My muscles had yet to drain themselves of energy from profuse shivering. I was weak from mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion. Yet, I still found it within myself to crack my head forward with all of my might against his when he spoke of breaking me. He fell back with a high-pitched chortle and I spat at him.

I winced as my forehead throbbed and I considered what he would do to Blake. The Joker shrugged into standing, still giggling to himself. The muscles on Blake's back and neck tensed with the anticipation of being hit, but The Joker wasn't interested in him anymore.

He approached me for the last time that evening and, so quickly that I hardly saw it, snapped out his knife and sliced through the middle of my bra. I snarled in protest as he cut each of the shoulder straps with surgical precision. He ripped the tattered bra from my midsection and slipped one of the severed straps between his yellow teeth. To my surprise, he undid my restraints while making it a point to maintain my gaze. He didn't even so much as glance at my exposed breasts.

He snatched my jaw and twisted my face from side to side, up and down. His eyes were calculating despite the untroubled grin on his face. I was chilled to my marrow. I used one hand to pinch closed the open halves of my shirt, the other to rip my nails down his wrist. He'd proven himself capable of becoming unhinged with the slightest of provocation and I could not be sure when or if he would return to his animalistic state.

His grin turned self-deprecating when he saw me cover myself. "I'm sorry, Blazey, I can see I've put in you in quite a _state_. What'd'ya say, I'll give you a day or two to rest and then I'll bring you back a little sur _prise_? Hey, if you're good I'll even bring you some food so you two _love_ birds don't find more than one way to _eat_ each other." He paused, slipping his tongue out and in again. "But on second thought, try to run," he sprang into motion, licking up the length of my cheek. I sobbed at his depravity. "I love a good _chase-sah_."

With that, he stepped back and made a show of displaying his palms to me innocently. I stood, arms crossed. I ached to go over to Blake, but I didn't want to draw The Joker's attention to him.

The Joker turned abruptly to leave, one hand in his pocket, one wielding my bra like a trophy. "Hope you don't mind if I keep this."

With that and the slam of a door, he was finally gone. Our relief could've been a blanket it was so physically nestled around us. The door wasn't closed a second before I was at Blake's side. I slipped the belt from around his wrists and ripped off a shred of fabric from the end of my tattered shirt. I secured it shakily around his slice wound before I did the same to his bullet-riddled thigh. I glanced up to find he'd shrugged off his shirt for me. I slid the new shirt on mechanically. I tried to channel my energy into inspecting his facial wound.

He lightly grabbed my hands after I'd dabbed up most of his blood with my ruined shirt. I reluctantly met his gaze. His eyes seemed darker than I'd ever seen them though I was oddly calm. There was still some blood on his eyelashes. He beheld me with a look of tired pity, tears collecting along his lower lashline.

He spoke through clamped white teeth. "Please _don't_ look at me like that."

There were deep purple semicircles beneath his eyes, his skin a few shades lighter than it's usual. He seemed to be barely grasping at the ledge of consciousness. His blinks were slow, struggling. "What are we going to do?"

"I don't know, Robin, I don't know. But we have to do something."

He shoved my hands away from him in an explosion of movement that made me fall back against the wall I started so hard, "You shouldn't have done that! I told you I could take it! You're so fucking selfish! I would rather get beaten to death than watch you get raped!"

I stood despite the pain all over, stricken with rage once more. Blake's shirt hung to mid-thigh on me and it was damp from his sweat. "Then it's a good fucking thing it wasn't your decision to make! He would've tried to rape me no matter what and you'd be _dead_!"

Blake spoke through his teeth at me, true and present fury radiating from him. I hadn't expected this, though I realized suddenly that I should've. "I'll sooner bang my head against the wall until I'm unconscious or worse than let you do that again!"

"Shut up! It won't matter because we're getting out of here."

His eyes fell finally to my feet, his tears quivering as they reached the tip of his sharp jaw before they tumbled onto his bloody lap. His bare back was heaving. "Blaze, will you please look at yourself?"

"What?"

"Go to the mirror and look."

I didn't need to go to the mirror. It only took a terrible, quiet realization for me to realize what he was referring to. I could feel the waxy pull of heavy greasepaint on my face and neck. I already knew what I would see when I leveled my gaze with my distorted self in the mirror to my left. Still, there was no preparation that could've counteracted the shock.

From my top lip down to the left side of my neck I was patchy red and white. Red was concentrated around my lips, and the full and blooming bloody bite-mark on the side of my neck.

Even when I practically fell against the sink and began pouring discolored boiling hot water down my face and neck to erase his marks, the bite wound leaked red as if he'd injected his greasepaint into me like venom. Even when I jammed my fingers down on the wound to push all of his venom from me, I swore I felt the venom trickle into my brain. But the realization of what had just happened didn't truly permeate me until I saw that the hot water had made my lip scar raise a mocking indelible red. My face and abdomen dripping wet, I collapsed against the wall.

"Blaze, I'm so sorry," Blake repeated again and again. I felt hands nestle around my throat, my heart thrummed so hard it seemed to rattle my brain in my skull. I pressed my knees hard against my forehead and gripped my hair.

I was distantly aware of familiar arms falling around me, though most dreadfully poignant to me in my panic attack was the fact that The Joker would be back.


	10. Spoiled

Spoiled 

Blake had a pocket knife. He was gripping it with white knuckles when the sensation of strangling finally faded and I stopped thinking of the squirming roaches in the fluorescent lights overhead. He'd moved slightly away from me and I prayed that I hadn't hit him in my stupor. All of the tension in his body was dissolved save for the clenching of his hand. His eyes were closed and maybe if I knew him a little less I would believe he was truly asleep.

"You have a knife."

He turned his bloodless face toward me. He had moments left of consciousness, if that. "I want you to have it."

I crawled over to him. I cradled his sweaty head on my chest and thought hard. There was tightness in my face from dried tears. "No, you're going to keep it. And when he tries it again you're going to cut free and kill him."

"No…" he swallowed hard, "No, you should have it. You'll be closer to him."

I kissed his temple and crossed my legs to hide the blood on my inner thighs. "Too close. He'll see me try to get free, he'll feel the knife under my clothes. He pays too much attention to me… I want you to promise me something though, Robin. Are you listening?"

He nodded and felt a tear hit my wrist. He knew what was coming. "If you get away and I don't, I need you to run. I'll even fight him if you promise to run. You can't help me if you're in here."

His tears puddled down into the crook of my elbow. There was a long stretch of silence and I thought he'd finally passed out. The tension in his fist fell and I slid the knife securely into his back pocket. I thankfully succumbed to sleep, but not so soon that I missed the slight nod Blake issued against my chest.

There was much waiting to be done when I woke. I inspected Blake's thigh wounds, trying to be gentle in my movements as he was a distinctly light sleeper. He'd shrugged to put his head in my lap, fully curled into a fetal position. At some point in the night, his lapse in consciousness had turned into slumber. He was dreaming. His upper lip and forehead twinkled with perspiration, aided by the smothering heat in the room. His forehead perforated with concern in his sleep, his mouth slightly parted.

There were sounds of The Joker's men shuffling about outside, loud male voices booming. It occurred to me that, in my panic, I'd never checked if the door was locked. I lightly slid Blake's head onto the floor and achingly stood. I limped to the door and twisted the doorknob. I was not surprised to find it was locked and apparently bolted from the outside. I wondered how many lives had been bled dry in that room to necessitate a double-lock.

I'd only just shrugged away from the door when I heard the deadbolt slide. I backed away protectively over Blake. "Wake up."

I couldn't spare half a moment to see if he responded to my request. I expected to see The Joker step through the door, back to torment us. Instead, I was met with one of the men who'd dragged Blake in yesterday. The one who so diligently sought my eyes.

He held a tray with a large plate of what looked to be rice and beans. He hadn't shut the door behind him. He seemed entirely unconcerned with our ability to escape.

I assumed from the scratch of fabric on fabric and the subtle but distinct click of a pocket knife that Blake was standing and made the same decision that I had.

I moved first. I dove and smacked the tray up toward his face before kneeing him hard in the balls. The man hefted halfway to the ground, tan face covered in food and shock. Blake issued an impressively precise hit to the edge of the man's jaw with the butt of the knife and the man went completely slack. The plate clattered loudly to the floor with him. He didn't even have time to scream.

To the chorus of the plate slowly rotating to eventual stillness, we flipped his body away from the door. I snatched the mostly-clean fork from the ground, as there was no better weapon in sight or in the man's pockets. My main and most potent objective was to get Blake away from here.

I put a hand on Blake's chest when he reached emphatically for the door handle. I slid my head a bit out of the crevice. The warehouse was awash with light. It was midday. The massive room was thankfully devoid of men, the voices concentrated to the most extreme corners. I hadn't noticed before, but what appeared to be tens of towering shelves formed the entire right half of the room. I didn't have much time to investigate, however, before Blake's patience reached its limit. His hand snatched mine and we stumbled along the only available route to the door. The north-facing wall was loosely covered in newspaper which offered privacy if little reprieve from the sun's rays.

We were both uncharacteristically slow thanks to our injuries. I felt completely and entirely naked, ready to feel the bite of a bullet in my back at any moment. Our feet made loud scuffs on the gritty cement beneath us. There was no change in tone or volume of men's business-like murmurs. It was out of luck and luck alone that no one had spotted us at first as we shuffled through the middle of the warehouse.

It took a painfully long amount of time for us to get halfway there. I was able to see the Gotham sky through the peeling corners of the newspaper on the windows; it was raining despite itself. I felt the beginnings of hope bubble up in my throat at the relative silence to my back. While the room was massive and our footfalls staggering, it looked to me as though we could actually make it. I half-sobbed, half-giggled, clutching Blake despite the pain that radiated from my every limb. Blake didn't look as convinced as I did.

When we were about three-quarters the way there, the screams first came and my hope fell heavily, "Fuck! The girl!"

I didn't look back, but I saw Blake's reaction when he did. His jaw clenched and he snapped his face forward. "Move!"

Impossibly, I pushed myself harder. Feet shuffled and men yelled. I heard and felt guns centered on my back within seconds and wondered for a suspended second if I was taking my last breath.

Another voice sliced through the cacophony as only it could, " _Miss_ _Blazeyyy_ you're not going to make me shoot your friend, are you? I have _so many_ more fun _games_ planned for him!"

I yanked Blake in front of me so he was shielded by my body. Feet were drawing closer and I couldn't hold back a cry of frustration. We were steps from the door. An ill-timed glance behind me showed The Joker running full-speed in my direction, led by two of his armed men. They were no less than a hundred feet back but gaining quickly.

I splayed my palm between Blake's muscular, pale shoulder blades. There was a consuming sadness blooming in place of the hope I felt moments before. There was the distinct possibility that both of us would not escape.

"Remember what you promised me!"

He looked back and clenched my hand around something metallic just as he crashed into the door. The door was mercifully unlocked and Blake all-but fell through it. His arms pumped at his sides, his energy apparently renewed by the bright Gotham day, which spit thin raindrops on us. He was growing farther away from me.

I was barely out of the threshold when a fleshy weight flung itself upon me from the side. I collided hard with the cement, feeling it lift the top few layers of skin on my right forearm and thigh. I blindly sunk my fork deep into my assailant. I felt more than heard his scream as he pushed himself away from me. I used the nearest wall for support to stand.

The item that Blake had clenched my hand around moments before was at my feet, knocked from my fist by the impact of the hit. It was Blake's pocket knife. I caught his bright eyes as I straightened up from retrieving it. Blake was frozen, hesitating behind the bricks of the building at the end of the block. Though he was far, I knew his face well enough to see the redness around his eyes, the pain in the set of his mouth. He didn't want to leave me though I doubted very much that someone as street savvy and well-trained as Blake would be found by even career criminals.

"Run!" I screamed over the groans of the man at my feet. I saw that I'd managed to sink the fork into my assailant's ribs.

That's all it took from me for him to disappear behind the corner. He was gone. I swallowed against the finality of it. I grit my teeth and willed my energy on getting myself as far as possible from the warehouse. I'd already lost half of my lead. I barely got behind the silver sedan parked across the street when I heard the heavy footfalls of The Joker and his men leaving the warehouse.

I fell immediately to my knees behind the silver sedan upon hearing the shuffling of feet. With some effort, I rolled myself beneath the car. I knew I was biding my time until he found me, but every moment The Joker spent looking for me he wasn't looking for Blake.

"I know, she's mine," The Joker intoned just loud enough for me to hear.

I folded my arms across my chest, glaring up at the sedan's grimy undercarriage. I tried to hush my exasperated breathing. I couldn't be sure, but I thought I heard footfalls fan out in both ways down the street.

And then there was another stream of scuffs growing louder. I couldn't keep myself from peeking. A pair of brown shoes with the same patterned green socks as yesterday walked heel-to-toe around the bumper of a car across the street. "Come on, cupcake. If you come out right now, I'll pretend like I'm surprised and I didn't already know where you're hiding."

I squeezed my eyes shut tightly together. My hand was clenched hard around the opened knife. His steps were agonizingly slow, no more than ten feet to my right.

"I mean, I know you grew up in a foster home but I'd think you played hide-and-seek at _least_ once before. This is pitiful, sweetling."

Rain misted across my face as the wind lightly buffeted. I refused to answer, hoping against hope that he was bluffing when he said he knew where I was.

His feet stopped inches away from my cheek. He sighed when my panicked breath was my only response. There was the click of a pocket knife being unsheathed and dull _thunk_ that I couldn't make sense of. Until, that was, the tire closest to my feet sunk with a low whoosh of air. The underbelly of the car was inches from my nose. He was slashing the tires.

"Blaz _zzeeyyy_ , my offer is ex _piring_. You can still come out."

I watched his feet with dread as they drawled toward my head. Another _thunk_ , another low whoosh. The underbelly was practically touching my face now.

I jumped into movement without really thinking but I was not about to let him taunt me any further. I slashed at the scuffed brown shoe inches from my face. The Joker was already stepping back, allowing my knife to only slice through the leather toe. His other foot slapped down on the pavement where my extended hand was microseconds before. He didn't manage to stomp on my hand, however a short glinting blade materialized from the sole of the shoe.

" _Oh_ , almost got me there!"

I crawled between the underside of the car and the curb on the opposite side of the car before he could stab me. I limped my way into a nearby alley. There was a narrow dark green door at the end of the brightly-lit alley, which I soon saw to be a dead end. The alley was clogged with two massive dumpsters, between which I could barely fit. The stench of heat-baked garbage only amplified my terror as I shuffled toward the door. I felt more than heard The Joker behind me.

It only took about fifteen steps for me to reach the end of the alley. I thankfully fell against the door and twisted the doorknob. It was locked. Of course it was.

He was behind me. I pressed my forehead to the cool metal of the door in defeat, feeling my forehead slick with sweat and rain. His breath washed down on the top of my head. I considered using the knife against him, but I knew my chances of actually sinking it into him while he was anticipating an attack were unlikely at best.

"Do you have any idea what it does to me when you _run_?" At the last word, I felt his chest press into my back lightly. The cool underside of his forearms touched me as he planted his hands on either side of my head. His smell mixed with the smell of the alley.

I pressed my eyes into my arm as hard as I possibly could. He punched the metal near my head and succeeded in making me jump, though not turn around. Hard fingers snatched my jaw and flipped me around after a long moment. I hid the open knife behind my thigh as I rotated to face him. His makeup looked stark and freshly applied compared to its faded glory last night.

" _Awww_ ," he laughingly taunted as though I was an angry kitten when I scowled at him. His voice was disturbingly emphatic as always. "You look like you just crawled out of a _grave_ , cupcake. Is it fucked up that I prefer you when you're all _grimy_ and beaten than when you're all dolled _up_ and beaten?"

I tried to look as though I'd given up. I glared down at his toes, trying to look as docile as possible, as he went in on me. His nails dragged raggedly up my leg and he thumbed the scar on my lip. His thumb pressed against my teeth, seeking access into my mouth. "What do you think, sweetling, should I fuck you into the wall of a dirty alley or into the floor of a dirty warehouse? I'm a _gentle_ man, so I'll let you choose."

I could hold back no longer. I was quick and precise, if slightly telegraphed. I was aiming for his unevenly white throat, partially exposed by his high patterned collar. He jolted away from me and rather than a slice to his neck a slice appeared on his sternum. I didn't have time to assess how deep I'd managed to cut him before I was twisted in hard arms. His fingers were an iron cage around mine, trying to squeeze the knife from my fingers. I felt his blood saturate my back. I struggled to maintain my hold on the knife handle.

"Did I ever tell you how much I really, _really_ like those little _tiny_ black shorts you girls wear?"

"Boss!" A henchman thankfully interrupted. "We couldn't find him."

The Joker's hard sigh washed across my hair. I couldn't tell if he was more upset about being interrupted from roughing me up or his men's failure to retrieve Blake. Either way, I gave him another thing to be upset about when I erupted into manic laughter.

"He got away! He got _away_ , you _fuck_! He's gunna _kill_ you!" The Joker's good mood was spoiled by my mirth. He ripped the knife from my hand and tucked me under his arm like a football. My involuntary giggles were reaching an almost Joker-level of intensity. "You have _nothing_ over me now, asshole! I got him away! I got him _away_ and it was fucking _easy_!"

I laughed even harder when I saw the rice still caught to the front of the beat up man's shirt and the glare on his bruised face. All of those big, strong men couldn't keep me from doing what I had to do even when I was injured and shaken. It was funny, really.

I laughed and shrieked all the way across the street, all the way behind the warehouse, even when The Joker was issuing clippy orders to several of his men, even when The Joker plopped me down in the passenger's seat of a car. I stopped abruptly, however, when I noted the slumped, balding form in the backseat.

The Joker fell into the driver's side of the car. He tried to look nonchalant as he fired up the car. He seemed to be waiting for me to ask about the passenger. I could only stare as the wild relief in me turned to dread. Cold fingers cupped my chin and rotated my horror-stricken face. I knew who it was seated behind me, though the head was flipped down to his chest and his face hidden. It was The Joker's surprise, as promised to me last night.

"What's wrong, princess? Not up for a little family reunion?"


	11. Men of Their Word

Men of Their Word

I stared, thunderstruck, at the unconscious man in the backseat. He had sparse, colorless hair, a soft build, plain khakis. He was swaying this way and that with the car's inertia. He was pathetically unremarkable, just as I remembered him.

The Joker's driving was more methodical than when we last drove. He'd secured both of my hands to the door handle with what I assumed to be Blake's handcuffs. The inside of the car was brown and unassuming. The wood-varnished dash stared back at my pitilessly as I processed my freshest and most unique agony.

It didn't take long for The Joker to tire of my panicked silence, "He was a lot easier to pick up than I thought, you know. I figured he'd still be in jail after the maiming he gave you. I didn't have time to ask him how he got out – he's been a little, um, _occu_ pied – but I'm hoping you could tell me."

I felt how swollen my under-eye bags were as I leveled my glare at him. We were passing over the Gotham Bridge. I strained to reach the window crank so I could yell at parallel-vehicles and gave up with a huff. The handcuffs were short, tight and unforgiving. I'd have to settle for trying to catch the eyes of passerby. "Like you don't already know."

"I wouldn't want to rob myself of hearing you say it. I have a _stink_ ing suspicion that you kept up with your _first_."

I glanced back at McCreery, half-expecting him to be awake. I didn't have the energy to snap. "He got out early on a fifteen year sentence for good behavior. They legally had to notify me, I didn't seek out the information."

"Did you ever think about hunting him down? Were you ever worried that he would hunt _you_ down?"

"I got a restraining order."

"But not before he stalked you to Gotham National."

"This is fucking ridiculous."

His hand fell on my thigh with a smack and squeezed heartily. I winced, watching a man pass us in the right lane. "Don't worry, precious. Truth be told, I think I might just let you sweat a little about Mr. McCreery back there. Plus, between you and me _no_ one's going to miss him. He's done some _pret_ ty nasty things."

"Get your hand _off_ of me."

"Your legs, Blaze, are just _stun_ ning. Does Robin tell you that enough?"

I stopped mentally imploring passerby to glower. "He'll come for me. He won't rest until you're dead."

"Oh, I love it when you get mad at me. It's like watching a puppy bark at a bear. And, sweetcheeks, he'll find me when _pigs_ fly!" _Ugh, puns_. "But even if he did, he would be doing me a favor. Where do you think he'll go? To what's left of the police station? Even _your_ boy can't work through those injuries. I needed to swing by the hospital anyways. I have someone near and dear to my heart who I've been meaning to see."

I popped my mouth open to bark at him but was interrupted when we juddered to a stop. I expected to see another goddamn grey warehouse awaiting me. Instead, I was met with a dull green two-story home that seemed to quiver on its foundation. The Joker finally lifted his hand off my thigh to push the vehicle in the park.

"Is this where you live?" I blurted. There were other houses, though the closest house was about fifty feet away and there were no cars in the driveway. _Maybe I can call out to them._

"Oh, _no_ , you could say this house belongs to a friend of a friend," I jerked away from The Joker as he reached over my knees to rummage around in the glove compartment. He plucked a black rectangle from the mass of loose papers and tissues. "I wouldn't worry _too_ much about where we are. You won't be particularly conscious anyway."

" _What_?"

He flipped open the black kit to reveal a series of small needles and a glass container filled with clear liquid. "Trust me, cupcake, this isn't usually how I like to _run_ things but I can't have you fucking about while I'm away, can I?"

I tried to concentrate myself to the farthest possible corner of the car. "Don't _touch_ me with that needle."

"Don't _worry_ , it's just a _lit_ tle concentrated Rohypnol. Your _daddy_ back there is a sick bastard, had it under the driver's seat when I picked him up. Don't call me a hero, but I think I saved some very unfortunate souls from his influence."

 _He's going to rape me. He's going to rape me while I'm unconscious and I won't even be able to fight him._ White rage blinded me before I twisted to the side and aimed a kick at the glass bottle in The Joker's fingers. He held the bottle behind his back and cackled as he forced my legs back down to my seat with one hand. He stretched out a long leg and hefted his weight over the center console and onto my lap to pin my legs. I opened my mouth to scream in the hopes that the neighbors would hear, but The Joker's sweaty palm contained my only hope.

"Come _on_ , you know _meee_ ," he taunted. He had his forearm pressed into my windpipe to free his hands so he could load up a needle. I tried to twist and buck, but between his massive pinning weight and my handcuffed wrists, I could barely twitch. I could only make pathetic gasps of protest around the obstacle of his arm. "You know I wouldn't want to deny myself that downright _nasty_ look in your eye when I mess with you. The only thing you have to worry about while you're out is bad dreams. And you can trust me because I have absolutely _no_ reason to lie to you."

I glared at him incredulously. How could I trust him not to rape me? I felt his forearm muscles ripple as he flicked the syringe.

My struggles redoubled as I anticipated the injection. The Joker mockingly shushed me, petting my cheek before there was a sharp pinch to the side of my neck. The weight was lifted from my throat and my head slumped to my left shoulder. The effects of the drugs were immediate and all-consuming. There were several moments in which I could only stare at the pale silver eyes of McCreery over my shoulder before my hate slipped away and I fell into a synthetic oblivion.

* * *

Blake

I followed the thin rivulets of rainwater to the first open sewer and slid myself into the dank underground tunnels. The shafts beneath Gotham were wide enough in diameter for me to crouch. My boots splashed through the stream at my feet. I paused each time I heard a voice, though both times the voices were male and I couldn't bring myself to call out to them for fear that they belonged to the Joker. I made my way through the tunnels mostly by touch. The darkness beneath Gotham was complete and consuming despite the blinding sun above ground. I felt unbelievably haggard, the pain in my legs prominent though manageable. I shuffled roughly north for what felt like half an hour before I thought myself far enough away from The Joker's warehouse to emerge.

When I managed to drag myself out of a manhole, I spotted the token triple X's across the street which signified another unsavory part of Gotham. I stumbled onto the sidewalk to find I'd emerged in the alley behind Pauli's Diner.

I left a bloody handprint on the door handle as I shoved inside the chrome building. I got some looks that would've been hilarious if I wasn't bleeding out. I collapsed against the waitress booth, reached over and rooted around until I found the handle of a phone.

"Sir! Sir, are you alright?!" a middle-aged waitress all-but shrieked in my face.

I shakily held up my Gotham P.D. badge to shush her as I held the receiver to my ear. I stabbed in the appropriate phone number and tapped my foot through the many rings. I didn't bother calling 911 when I had a more reliable number at my disposal.

"Gordon speaking."

"Gordon, it's Blake. Get men over to 990 14th Street in the Narrows, it's another one of The Joker's warehouses. At least one hostage, at least fifteen armed men."

"Gotcha. Hold for me, Blake." There was about thirty seconds of silence in which Gordon scrambled his men. "Are you okay? You weren't accounted for after the explosion last night and we were missing a patrol vehicle."

"Are there cars already dispatched to 14th?"

"Yes, the first unit should be there in three. Are you okay?"

"No, I need you to bring a med kit to Pauli's Diner and drive me to 14th. He took Blaze."

He sounded as though I was his unruly child, "How injured are you?"

"Nothing a med kit can't fix, Gordon." Before he could continue along his line of questioning, I hung up.

It took a record five minutes for red lights to wash across through the windows of Pauli's. I shrugged achingly into standing position. However, rather than Gordon's unit vehicle, an ambulance awaited me by the curb. EMT's rushed out and stomped toward the diner.

I was fucking furious. I snatched the phone and punched in Gordon's number once again before they entered. This time, Gordon answered without missing a beat.

"I don't want to hear it, Blake."

I slapped the hand of the female EMT away from me. She was still trying to speak to me as I yelled into the phone, "Fuck you, I'm not going in that fucking ambulance! Get your ass over here and take me to 14th!"

"Do you think I have time to play chauffeur to some rookie? Go in the ambulance, kid. The Joker, his men and your girl are long gone from 14th."

"Fuck!" I exclaimed, slamming the receiver down. The EMT was joined by another, who towed with him a yellow stretcher. The goings-on of the restaurant had screeched to an unceremonious halt due to my outburst and everyone who wasn't already staring at me wide-eyed sure as shit was then.

"Sir, you're injured. Please stop being belligerent and lie down so we can treat your injuries."

I sighed hard. There was nothing I could do if Blaze and The Joker were already gone. I limped to the stretcher and answered each of the EMT's questions shortly, my mind otherwise occupied. I was unsurprised when they hauled me to the ambulance and drove me to Gotham General Hospital. Both of my major wounds were swollen and I needed to have the bullet surgically removed from my thigh. A nurse rushed me to a room for surgery prep, informed me that I would wake in several hours following the surgery and "we'd see" how long I was admitted afterward.

Of course, I argued with the nurse about the necessity of the surgery. Each moment I spent unconscious in a hospital bed was another moment The Joker had to kill, rape or torture Blaze. I had no doubt he'd make her suffer for my escape, which was all for naught if it meant I couldn't save her.

I called Gordon once more at the last possible moment in the hopes he would have an update, but The Joker seemed to have cleaned the warehouse down to the last bullet. I went into my surgery wired and frustrated beyond belief.

As promised, I woke what the nurse confirmed to be three hours after my surgery. I was uncomfortably numb and bandaged at both thighs and above my eyebrow. I called Gordon once more and he once again denied any more leads on The Joker.

I could do nothing but try to convince my nurse that I was well enough to be discharged in the following hours. There were points at which I couldn't help but yell. A part of me knew I was becoming irrationally aggressive and there was little I could do to save her even if I was fully healed, but the majority of me wanted to do as much for her as I possibly could.

The nurse eventually gave me a mild sedative when I tried to walk out. While I was still conscious, I seemed to be only loosely tethered to reality which is why I thought it so strange when screams fell from the hallway perhaps half an hour after I was administered the sedative. Through my door's thin rectangular window, I watched dazedly as doctors and nurses begin to wheel patients toward the elevators. I speculated idly what the source of all of the panic was. I must've dozed off for several moments before I heard someone enter my room. A nurse busied herself with disconnecting my IV. A tall shadow entered after her.

"Behind you," I muttered far too late. So fast I could barely make it out, the form leveled what looked to be a gun in her direction. She gasped but did not scream as he shoved her against the wall. I blinked when I saw the form was The Joker, outfitted ridiculously in a discount Halloween store nurse's costume and wig.

I thought for sure I was dreaming. The Joker clenched my fingers around something cold and rectangular, never peeling his eyes from the nurse. "A message from your _princ_ ess, little bird. Catch her if you can." He stepped closer to the nurse so he was crowding her against the wall, "Go _ahead_ and tell someone you saw me here, Trudy," he flicked her name tag with the gun, "then you and me can play _doc_ tor."

And then he turned with a flourish and skipped out of the room. The nurse shakily sobbed for a moment before an intercom announcement made her jump, "All patients and personnel must be moved to the courtyard immediately. Code Black. Code Black."

"What's Code Black?" I wondered aloud, nearly giggling at how my voice lagged.

"Bomb threat," the nurse replied shakily as she helped me into a wheelchair. The nurse was anxious, glancing behind her repeatedly. I locked eyes with several other patients as we lined up outside of the elevator, though I barely seemed to register their faces. It took hardly thirty seconds for us to be inserted in the elevator and escorted out of the ground floor. One by one, we were filed into buses. The nurse helped me into a seat and rushed out the front of the bus to help other patients. I wondered if my vision of The Joker was real. I remembered jerkily the object The Joker left me with, still sealed in my right fist.

 _It's a phone_ , I realized as another patient plopped down in the bus seat next to me.

I forced myself to focus. Immediately upon unlocking the phone I discovered a video loaded and ready. I tentatively thumbed the play button, blinking repeatedly to shake the tired haze blanketing my actions and sight.

Blaze's pale face filled the screen, her lips the color of talcum powder. She was apparently asleep on a dimly-lit wooden floor. A gloved hand pat her cheek lightly. She stirred, but didn't open her eyes.

I frowned deeply at the screen. Even in my drugged state, I didn't like where this was going.

" _Wakeeyyyy, wakkkeyyy."_

Her brow furrowed and her irises visibly moved behind her eyelids but she was not fully conscious until the hand slapped down viciously on her cheek. She thundered awake in a fury.

"Hey?!" she interjected as she looked past the camera at what I knew to be The Joker. She eyed me furiously through the camera lens and began to struggle as she began to return to full consciousness. The camera shook slightly as The Joker's arm moved according to her struggles. _He must've been practically seated on top of her_ , I realized with disgust. She swatted at the camera and The Joker jerked it out of her reach while still keeping her in-frame. His giggles were even more chilling on tape.

"Well, hello sleeping _beauty_. Do you know you _talk_ in your sleep?"

Her eyes were hateful pits, "What did you do to me while I was asleep? And why are you fucking filming me? HELP! HELP M – mmm!" she mumbled fiercely into The Joker's palm as he clapped it to her mouth. Her fingers looked comically small and frail prying at his long muscular hands. The Joker set the camera on the ground to his right. He was visible from the stomach down; she was still the main focus. Her cheeks were flushed now with wrath and mortification as The Joker pinned her hands beneath one of his. He gripped her jaw and turned her face toward the camera.

She was still wearing my shirt. My tears fell on the screen.

His voice was belittling as always, "Now, _why_ don't you tell Robin John Blake what I had in the back of my car this morning after _you_ two pulled that nasty trick?"

Her eyes wheeled uncertainly and she didn't answer. She looked like a cornered animal, trying to figure a way out.

He was anticipating, even looking forward to her lack of cooperation. " _No_? You don't want to tell him? Well, maybe if I reach down _here_ I can work you like a _pup_ pet." His hand left her jaw and jolted down her belly to the chorus of his sick laughter.

I nearly crushed the phone in my hand before Blaze interjected desperately, "McCreery! He had McCreery!" The Joker's fingers and laughs stopped.

"Spoiler alert! _That_ was the surprise I told you two love birds about last night. You were so worried what I would do to you when you were out, weren't you? Do you know what the Big Bad Joker did to you, Blazey?"

"What did you do?"

He seemed insulted. I cringed when I heard his lips smack together, " _Nothing_ , sweetling. And that's the _point_. I told you I wouldn't kill Robin last night and I didn't. I told you I wouldn't do anything… unsavory to you while you were unconscious and I didn't. _I'm a man of my word_ ," he snarled lowly, pushing their chests flush together so his full torso and head were in frame. His limp, greasy hair fell partially onto her cheeks. His free hand squeezed her jaw and he shook her face for emphasis as he spoke, "So you and Robin can be _lieve_ me when I say that for every day he doesn't find me, I'm going to invent another little sur _prise_ for my cupcake. And lover boy, _you_ can believe that I'll be pressing her further and further the longer you're away."

"Get the fuck off me! Don't you _dare_ try to find me alone, Bla – !" The Joker issued a vicious hit to her gut, effectively cutting off her speech and making her wince. He tried to press his face close to her's again. Even in profile, I could see the resolve flicker in her eyes before she cracked her forehead into The Joker's nose.

She shoved him off to her left and her Converse were visible as she scrambled away. He stood with surprisingly grace and slowly drawled his feet to her until they were both out of frame. There was pounding and her frustrated shouts, as though she was banging on a locked door. She flew back into frame, clutching the back of her head in agony as though he'd ripped her down by her hair. His brown shoes were visible, and then his palm as he reached once again for the camera with a high cackle. He stood above her for a moment, the tops of his brown lace-up shoes visible on either side of her as she tried to crawl back on her elbows.

"Take a good look at her, Roby. That light in her eyes will be _long_ gone the next time you get to touch her."

The camera jolted toward her suddenly as though he fell back on top of her. With a wild cackle from him and a scream from her, the footage ended. The video paused on a freeze-frame which perfectly depicted the tears collecting on her lower lash line, the contortions of her face as she screamed.

I let the phone fall from my hands with a clank. My pounding forehead sagged against the dingy blue seat in front of me. The bus's movements jostled me lightly as we rumbled away from the hospital. Blaze had always had a bullseye called bravery on her forehead, but never did I suspect trouble this serious would steal her from me. I considered, still in my haze, if I would've let myself fall so pathetically in love with her if I knew where her path would lead.

I had to stop The Joker, of that much I was certain. I stared down at Blaze's tearful hazel eyes on the phone screen at my feet. There was the distinct sound of an explosion to the rear of the bus. Faces snapped backward and eyes widened as another, much grander explosion bloomed.


	12. The Taste

The Taste

I could tell by the dull throbbing in the back of my skull that he'd knocked me out through force rather than drugs that time. My hands were cuffed to the bottommost handle of a vintage dresser, the room's lone titivation. The thing was a beautiful anchor, dark and ornate in design. The room was older and clean, highly favorable to the bathroom in the warehouse. Slivers of light leaked through the plywood crisscrossed over the gaping windows to splay thin fingers on the blonde hairs over my forearm. I was acutely aware of how bad I had to pee.

I felt like a cadaver, really and truly, as I sat in a fetal position and dreaded the moment when The Joker returned with fresh hell to rain upon me. With my hands cuffed, I couldn't so much as crouch.

I cringed pathetically when I heard the door rattle after an immeasurable amount of time. It was not The Joker who first entered, but McCreery. If there was anything that could've revived my anger over my fear, it was seeing my two least favorite men.

McCreery's bound hands rested a paper plate of rice and beans and a bottle of water at my feet. I snarled at him though he didn't even have the courage to meet my eyes. His face and forehead were laden with sweat. The Joker gestured to the corner of the room closest to me and McCreery fell into it so quickly he must've bruised his ass.

I smirked a little to myself when I saw The Joker had excluded the fork this time in favor of a plastic spoon. I tried to imagine why The Joker would bother feeding me.

The Joker bounced on his heels so he was level with me, elbows on his knees. His makeup was faded as though he'd been wearing it for days on end. His broad shoulders hunched. His presence was as consuming as always. He was wearing what appeared to be a fresh version of the vest and shirt I'd sliced through yesterday during my attempted escape. I tried to make myself as small as possible while maintaining his gaze.

"Hel _lo_ , sweet pea. Don't _you_ look nervous?" I knocked my head back against the dresser when his gloved hand reached for my face. Of course, there was nowhere for my head to go and The Joker cupped my chin with ease. He thumbed my bottom lip, pulling it to see if my scar was continuous inside my mouth.

"What did you do to Blake?"

"Mmm, I _think_ he got out before the hospital exploded. He was _all_ drugged up, sweetling, he's not coming for you for a _while_."

"You don't know Blake. He'll come for me. He _has_ to come for me."

His pinprick eyes narrowed though his smile was ever-present. "Well, either way, I'll be seeing him again very soon if only to deliver our next video. Can't have competition for my girl, can I?"

My upper lip spasmed at his reference to me. I remembered our last "video" and I prayed that Blake had been too drugged up to fully appreciate it. Or better, that The Joker had never delivered it.

I lashed out, kicking at the plate of food and sending it toward McCreery. "God damn it! Why don't you just kill me, asshole? Just fucking kill me!"

He rolled his eyes like I was an insolent child, standing with a huff. My chest rose and fell erratically as I glared up at him with dread. "What do you think Blake would say if he heard you say that? I was going to feed and water you but you seem anxious to get started," he unloaded the camcorder from his purple jacket with a chilling grin. His broad shoulders were slouched over me. He flipped it open and the red button told me he was recording.

 _This is fucking happening again._

"Hello, ladies and gentle _men_. Welcome to another episode of Survivor!" he swiveled the camera to face him, "I'm joined today by two very special guests, Mr. Pervy McCreepy," he showed McCreery, "And his first and _fav_ orite plaything, _Miss_ Blaze Plissken," the camera faced me once more. I felt my mouth quiver with rage, my arms and neck twitching chaotically. I wondered if I could kick the camera from his hand.

His voice was reaching and grandiose as he explained to Blake, "Now, these two have a pretty _grue_ some history and in our game today all our main player has to do to sur _vive_ … is tell me and all you _love_ ly people _ev_ erything that happened between them so we can sort out this _lit_ tle lover's quarrel."

"Oh, no _fucking_ wa – " my breath was stolen when The Joker stomped on my bad leg.

I could only curl into it and let the waves of pain wash over me. I would not cry or scream. The Joker shrugged closer to me no doubt to more closely capture my agony and continued, "Now, I think Blazey here sees the _prob_ lem with the plan. She has no incentive, no _inspiration_. So, for every lie, every refusal, Blazey and I are going to _skip_ across the bases! And maybe, just maybe, she'll make my day and take me to _home_! _HA_!"

The Joker knew exactly what happened between McCreery and I; the transcripts from my lawsuit would spell it out to him in exhaustive detail. He seemed absolutely fixated on breaking me apart bit by bit, making me relive my greatest trauma. _Why does he even bother?_

I suppose that by then I would've learned not to wonder why sick people do sick things.

" _So_ ," cool leather-clad fingertips tucked a stray piece of hair back from my face. "Why don't we start right at the _root_? When did the problem first arise?"

Of all of The Joker's challenges, this was the most doable. There was no reason for The Joker to even lay a finger on me if I could detail my rapes, a feat I'd managed when I was merely fourteen and testified against McCreery.

 _This, I can do. This, I can do._

I balled my toes in my shoes and pretended I was talking about someone else like I did fifteen years ago. I was impressed with my ability to feign indifference, "He was weird from the moment he first met me. I never liked him. I told the adoption agent but she explained that I should've been grateful to have a family so interested in a problematic child of my age. He waited until I was with them a couple weeks before he did anything more than sniff my panties and try to watch while I was showering," I paused to spit in McCreery's direction. I couldn't help myself. The Joker nodded mockingly, unconvinced of my facade.

"And then he barged in on my shower one night, forced me to watch while he washed himself when his wife was gone. Then about two weeks later – "

"At-ta-ta, cupcake. Getting a little _hasty_ there. I think it's safe to say we all want the juicy details. Did he just wash himself or did he jack off to you all _hud_ dled in the corner?"

McCreery was a relic from an old battle from which I emerged bloodied but victorious. The Joker was a current enemy, a more chaotic and foreboding foe against whom I had no idea if I would win. I felt some of my reality slip back over me as I stared up at Blake through the camera. I tried to keep my voice as even as possible, "He… touched himself."

"And was it the first time you'd ever seen a man in his wet, _glist_ ening glory? Were you scared, confused… _aroused_ , maybe? Come on, just 'tween us girls."

 _Maybe this won't be as easy as I thought._ "Yes, it was the first time. And I was as _angry_ then as I am now. I knew what was happening. And I was _not_ aroused. His dick looked like a fucking rotten banana."

"So it was big then? Hear that, McCreepy? Looks like you made a good first im _press_ ion. Bigger than Robin's? Oh yeah, wave to him." I didn't wave. He exasperatedly leveled the camera on himself to explain, "She's a little _tied_ up right now," before centering it back on my hunched form. "So, what did he tell you to keep you quiet for a whole two _weeks_?"

"Textbook abuser bullshit: no one would believe me, they'd return me and no one else would adopt me because they'd think I'd accuse them of assault too and he didn't touch me so there was no proof."

He swiveled and issued a smack to the side of McCreery's balding head. He flinched away from The Joker pathetically. "Oh, _amateur_ hour, McCreepy! Always go for the violent threats over the emotional! So two weeks later…"

I tried to keep the details as minimal as possible. Best to start with a low bet and work my way up, I predicted, "He took me to meet his parents and when we were heading home he pulled over and forced himself on me and patched me back up and drove us home."

The Joker centered the camera back on himself. He mimed like he was falling asleep before jolting awake again, " _Boring_! Do you think we should accept that as an adequate level of detail, piggy?... I'll take your silence as a _no_."

"Argh!" I exclaimed when The Joker jolted into movement and yanked my ankle away from my body. My already-tender head slapped against the floorboards hard enough to make my vision dot black. The wet weight of his tongue touched at the hollow between my collarbones and trailed upward. The tip of his tongue kissed up the column of my throat to the erratically pounding bundle of vessels in my neck and then higher still. I knew what was coming. I sobbed out to McCreery against my better judgement, but he was immobile, staring at us in twisted wonder.

The Joker's greenish head pulled up when his wet tongue met the edge of my jaw. The anticipation almost hurt more than the act as I felt the exhale from his laugh fall across my cupid's bow. When I closed my eyes, I couldn't shake the image of Blake's toasted brown eyes as close to me as The Joker's were then.

"Please, stop," I sobbed before a hard hand clapped to my jaw and immobilized it.

As if he was reading my mind, his kiss was as tender as Blake's was the day we met in the hospital. This, I was not prepared for. He swallowed my scream. I couldn't decide if his violence or tenderness was worse.

"Motherfucker!" I screamed when he pulled his face away from mine.

"Ah, ah, ah," he chastised, smoothing my hair on my forehead while still gripping the lower half of my face. Tears were rolling into my temples and I growled wordlessly. I caught sight of the camera still diligently aimed at me. I hadn't even seen him set it down. I arched my back and tried to kick at the camera, situated to my left. It would be made so much more bearable if I knew Blake didn't have to watch this happen. Unsurprisingly, my legs were too short and the movement too awkward to accomplish.

I resolved myself to do this, to relive my past trauma while experiencing a fresh one, if only it meant Blake didn't have to watch me get further debased. "That's base one, Blazey. Do you want to try again?"

I tried to catch my breath, facing The Joker again uncertainly. He hadn't noticed me try to kick the camera. The indifference was gone from my voice. Distress took its place. The Joker's soulless eyes flicked across my face as I explained, "He held me down, taped my mouth, stripped me naked and raped me in the roof of his car, okay? Is that what you want to hear?!"

"Now we're _get_ ting somewhere! Did he come inside you or maybe on those new pert boobs courtesy of Mr. Puberty?"

"Ugh, god! He used a condom!"

"Did you bleed?"

"Yes! He punched me a lot!"

"Did you cry?"

"Yes! I was fucking fourteen years old, asshole!"

His eyes were smugly narrow as he appraised my truly shaken form. In hindsight, my feigned indifference was probably a bad idea. Anything that made The Joker feel like he wasn't being taken seriously was probably a bad idea.

"And did you stay quiet about it that time?"

The stream of my tears into my hairline intensified, "Yes."

"Why?"

"He said he would kill me if I told anyone. That was _all_ he said the whole time he was raping me."

"And when his dick was shoved deep inside that freshly pubescent cunt, did you believe him?"

My voice was quiet and my eyes shut, "Yes."

"Would you have, daddy?" The Joker asked McCreery.

There was a beat of uncertain silence, to which The Joker's eyebrow arched. I'd almost forgotten McCreery was present for every word of my rehashing. The Joker peeked over his shoulder threateningly when he failed to respond.

"No," McCreery answered after a moment.

"' _No_ ,'" The Joker exaggeratedly mouthed to me and then lower right in my ear as I stared at the uneven ceiling, "I hate liars."

The edges of my handcuffs cut more and more deeply into my inner wrists. "Can you get the _fuck_ _OFF OF ME_?!"

"Why, Blazey? Having trouble _focus_ ing?" About half of my abdomen was covered by his massive hand as he splayed his fingers under my shirt. The nail of his index finger dug between my breasts and he smiled, oh he smiled as he hovered his palm over my breast without quite touching it.

He tasted his blood red lips as he ghosted over my nipple. "How many times did he fuck you, cupcake?"

Panic found me and my eyes sealed shut again. "Three!"

"Three! The way you've been crying about it you'd think it was _fifty_! The second time better be _good_ , Blazey, I'm barely at half-mast." My shut eyes only amplified the truth to his claim pressed against my belly.

"You're so fucking disgusting." His fingers took an aggressive handful of my breast as punishment and I screamed again to a careless room.

"You were saying?"

When I spoke, his vile caresses halted though his hand remained cupping me. "The second time he caught me while I was sleeping on the couch as his wife left. He raped me right there and this time he cut me on my sternum because I screamed. He made me clean my blood off the couch and floor while I was still naked."

"And his wife never _not_ iced?"

"I don't know if she did. We found out in the course of the trial that she'd suspected him of being a pedophile but sought adoption anyway. She found child pornography on his computer."

"Did you fight him?"

"Yes. I _always_ fought him."

" _Shocker_. Is that why you chose her, McCreery?"

He knew better than to pause this time. He had the audacity to smile at what I'm sure was a fond memory for him as he caught my eyes, "No, I chose her because she was small and one of the only girls left at the orphanage. She seemed depressed. I wasn't counting on her being so resolved."

"Mmmm," The Joker murmured appreciatively, appraising me. "Is that why you cut her? To break her?"

"Yes, it frustrated me that she never seemed broken, she was always angry rather than accepting. That was a big part of it for me, feeling like I'd dominated her. I thought if I could scar her she would at least remember me and in that way I would always win."

"Did he ever make you come?"

My gaze cracked to The Jokers. Ice drew the blood from my flushed cheeks. "What?"

His greasy head tilted inquisitively, eyes narrowed so only the deep brown pits were visible and none of the whites. His lips crowded mine, I twisted my face to the side and got an eyeful of McCreery's loafers. The apex of my breasts touched The Joker's chest when I inhaled. His stinking breath washed across my cheek. His voice was low and threatening, like when he first asked how I got my scar. "Are you really going to make me repeat myself?"

Fingers trailed lower, catching on the edge of my shorts. My stunned pause was only half inspired by pure fear. My voice quivered, "No, I never had an orgasm by him."

"She's lying."

Both of our gazes snapped to McCreery again, mine disbelieving and Joker's hungry. McCreery's brow was tilted at me arrogantly. He didn't feel like he had to sell me out, he _wanted_ to. _You fucking bastard._

"I felt her orgasm the second time. I _made_ her."

Sheer panic wracked me. I knew what would happen if The Joker caught me in a lie, "Shut the fuck up! I didn't! I di - !" I screamed before The Joker's hand closed around my throat.

He was smirking like I'd just handed him a million dollars, "You're _lying_ , princess? Daddy made that little pussy of yours soaking wet, didn't he? Nod yes and I'll _stoo-ooop_ ," he taunted.

I tried to beat at his back with my knees, but he didn't seem bothered. I shook my head no. I couldn't bring myself to admit it. Maybe I could convince him McCreery was lying.

"No?" The hand not sealed around my windpipe crept between my shorts and underwear. I shook my pounding head again. "You'd rather let me," his finger dragged along my slit through my underwear and his pupils swelled, "than admit that you en _joy_ ed it, if even for a _mo_ ment?"

"He's ly – lying!" I panted around the obstacle of his hand. My tears and sweat were making my hair stick to my temples and neck as my desperation mounted.

"Aw, I don't know about _that_. I don't think he would lie to me. Like you're doing now. Like you did to that judge. Just nod yes, cupcake."

"NO! He's lying, he –" I cringed when he tightened his hand around my throat threateningly. _How does he know I'm lying? I lied in my testimony too, there's no way for him to know,_ "H – he hates me."

He smiled with a snarl and released me. He bent so he could yank my shorts and underwear down my legs. "You're a terrible liar, lovely. And what a sweet little cunt you have!" His fingers cupped me as I struggled to regain my breath. I jolted away from him, but he held tight around my hips.

 _Not again, not again, not again._

"Stop!" I shrieked when my breath returned. He was gnawing on his bottom lip, leaning back and twisting this way and that to inspect my exposed vagina. He peeled off his glove so he could press his fucking freezing fingers to me. His face was so close to mine, I could see and smell every drop of greasepaint cracked in the planes of his face.

"I will. But I want to hear you _say_ it, _sweet_ ling. Admit he made you see the fucking stars. Say it… _SAY IT_!" He growled with stunning ferocity, forcing a finger inside of me.

"Yes, he made me! He made me! Please stop!"

He didn't stop. His thumb found my clitoris and I buried my head into the crook of my elbow when he started rubbing deliberately hard. I couldn't have been drier from pain and fear, which only amplified the chaotic, maddening pain I felt from below. The heels of my feet dug into the floorboards, "STOP YOU FUCKING ANIMAL!"

" _How_ did he make you come?"

"He licked me!"

"And how long did it take for you to come all over your rapist's face?"

" _I don't know_!" I sobbed, "It felt like days but probably minutes. Please _stop_!"

"Is that true, daddy?"

"Yes."

With one more harsh rub, The Joker released me. I sighed with relief. The Joker's fingers seemed to have a direct line to my mind. He remained atop me, though, his fingers racing my rib cage through my shirt as I sobbed into my arm.

"So that just leaves the last time, doesn't it? The… _climax_."

I needed no further prompting. I wanted nothing more than this terrible moment to be over, to be able to cover myself from both of their penetrating gazes. "I tried to run away the day before my first day at my new school. He found me off the highway trying to hitch a ride. He drove me to an abandoned warehouse. He cut me up, gave me all of these scars and raped me for the last time. I think he knew it would be the last time. His wife thought I would open up to her, but by the end of that second month we'd barely shared twenty words. She'd told him to take me directly back to the orphanage once he found me, and he did after he hurt me. He said if I told anyone even if he went to jail he had friends who would rape me and my friends at the orphanage."

"Then what made you tell lover boy?"

"He saw the blood under my shirt and I was having a panic attack so I couldn't stop him from calling the police. Before I knew it Gordon was taking Blake and I to the police station. After that I insisted that I testify at the trial."

"Smart move, McCreery." He grabbed the camera and leveled it on himself. He stuck his first two finger into his mouth and sucked. My stomach jolted at the sight. Finally, _finally_ The Joker hefted off of me, only to gibe as he gazed down at me, "She tastes as sweet as she looks, but you know that! 'Til next time. You wanna wave, precious? No?" He clicked the camera off and slipped it back into his pants pocket.

Though tears clouded my vision and I quickly yanked my knees close to my chest to hide my naked lower half, I leveled The Joker a glare that would melt marble, "I'm going to kill you."

A coward through and through, McCreery's eyes went wide at my words. He would never understand what drove my courage in the face of death personified. The Joker's smile was light, his tenor reprimanding as he stepped toward me, "I already _told_ you. I don't like _liars_."

"Yeah? I don't like sadistic, murderous _rapists!_ "

Our activities must've reopened his wound. It wouldn't be a day with The Joker if he didn't come apart at the seams with inappropriate laughter every now and again. He gasped through his mirth, clutching his sternum through his shirt which was splotched with blood. "You think you're _better_ than me because you haven't _killed_?"

I knew he wasn't taking me seriously, but I couldn't have been more serious, "No, I'm better than you _period_ , asshole."

"Mmmmm. We'll see, won't we, precious?" he lurched toward me one last time and held my chin. His teeth pulled at my scar as his lips ghosted over mine, his tongue tracing along the ridge of pallid tissue afterward. I lurched forward to bite his tongue, and he backhanded me without even so much as blinking. His full lips twitched and his eyes still screamed of hunger as he ran a hand down my exposed thigh.

He insisted on kissing me, touching me, standing over me constantly. I had no doubt that he'd done much worse to girls and that a mere kiss meant nothing to him. No, it wasn't the simple acts that made him want to maul me, but the fact that I didn't _want_ to be kissed that inspired him to do so constantly. To dominate me. To remind me that at any moment he could kill, maim or rape me.

 _As if I need a reminder._

There was a light jingling as The Joker tossed a small silver key to McCreery. My handcuff key, I presumed, "Clean up, sweet pea. You've got a long week ahead of you."


	13. Knuckles

Knuckles

Blake

Vicious pain racked up my knuckles. Gordon stumbled but did not fall. I was being escorted out of the hospital corridor before I even registered what I did.

I must've made quite a scene as I was roughly escorted through the lobby screaming, "Fuck, Gordon, I'm sorry, just _let me see him_! Let me go!"

The two officers escorting me all tossed me into the small staff break room. The taller of the two, whose name tag read 'Adam,' shoved my struggling form against the vending machine and gave me an intimate view of his patchy facial hair. His forearm was pressed to my clavicle. As if that could keep me pinned.

"You could get your badge nabbed for this. Get a hold of yourself, you just assaulted a higher-up."

"And I'm about to assault you too if you don't get your fucking hands off of me."

He rolled his eyes, "Look, I don't know you but there can't be a good reason to punch the Commissioner."

I clutched his hand and twisted. His head slapped against the surface of a nearby table. I clenched his hand high in the air with his shoulder pinned. "That's fucking right. You don't know me. My best friend is getting tortured by The Joker and that _asshole_ in that hospital bed getting three square meals a day could help me fucking find her."

The officer's partner began to tug on me. I released Adam to the chorus of their shouts.

I stormed out of the break room, earning myself another round of wide-eyed glances from the people in the waiting room. I was in quite the state. I limped like a motherfucker, blood dampening my jeans where my wounds were particularly stubborn, the rings under my eyes sagging a deep true purple. The last time I could remember sitting was on the bus a day ago. I'd been on the move since, starting with submitting the footage for analyzing and discovering that there was a lackey of The Joker who'd been injured rather than killed in the shootout with the police a week ago. I hadn't even bothered discharging myself from the hospital. I assumed they thought I was lost to the post-explosion mayhem.

Gordon was nursing a bloody nose when I arrived back in front of The Joker's henchman's room. He held up a palm and stepped squarely in my way when he saw me. Red was smeared along his bottom lip and mustache.

"Move."

The two officer goons from earlier caught up to me, ready to pounce. Gordon, on the other hand, couldn't have been less concerned, "Why must I always be the voice of reason between you and Blaze? I have a kid of my own, ya know, I can't look after all three of you at once."

My voice was a growl, "I'm glad you're making light of this."

"You're not on duty, you're irate, you're breaking about three safety codes just standing here and I've specifically been assigned to keep you out of this very injured man's room – I don't have the time nor the ungodly ability to think of an excuse as to why I'd let you - "

I shouldn't have had to remind him of the stakes. "This is ridiculous! Why are we even having this conversation?"

He took another wipe at his bloody mustache and hooked his arm around my neck. He led me away though I was far from cooperative at first, "If you would let me _finish_ , kid, I would tell you that I'm not in any capacity letting _you_ into that room, but when he gets medically cleared I will be interrogating him about the whereabouts of The Joker and, yes, Blaze. There's not a world where I wouldn't do everything in my power to get her out of that sick son of a bitch's hands. But I can't interrogate him if I think you're going to assault him like you assaulted me, alright?"

"So what am I supposed to do? Just sit out here and twiddle my thumbs until he's cleared and you're done with him?"

His eyes never looked more tired, not that he didn't have just cause. The Joker had managed to shoot Gordon and two of his favorite troubled orphans, not to mention bring all of Gotham to their knees in the past week alone. It occurred to me that I'd never managed to acknowledge his resurrecting act or his newfound commissionership.

"Here's an idea, Blake. How 'bout you sit down? Put something resembling food into your mouth? Maybe shut your eyes for more than five minutes? There are some vending machines in here," he steered me back toward the break room and forced me down into a chair with a clatter. He plopped a handful of loose change onto the table in front of me after fumbling with his wallet. He collapsed with a huff into the chair opposite me and extended a hand to my shoulder.

"She's strong, our Blaze. If there's one person in Gotham that could keep a high head in the face of The Joker, it's her."

I fought to keep my voice from breaking. "You didn't see him. You didn't see the look on her face when he was attacking her. He feeds off her resistance, he knows about her past, he even has McCreery. _No one_ can handle what he's doing to her. He's killing her," my throat clenched. I made no move to wipe away the tears I felt slip down my face as I verbalized the mental loop I'd been revolving in all day, "I left her with him because she _asked_ me to! Because she knew that if I got away I could save her. I _have_ to save her..."

He bowed his head, kneading his forehead I assumed to hide tears of his own. Him and Blaze had always shared an intimate relationship akin to father and daughter. It was a relationship I would never have and would never understand. Gordon had always favored her so, ever since he scooped her up at the orphanage almost fifteen years ago.

"We're going to get our girl back the right way."

As if in cue, a nurse pushed open the break room door to my back. "The patient is cleared."

Gordon stood, his expression all business once more. He ran a hand across his mustache, clearing away the last of the crusted blood. "I'll be there in just a moment." The door sighed shut behind me. "I'm going to go interrogate this asshole. If I see you outside of this room before I come and get you I'm going to arrest you for obstructing justice and assault."

"Gordon – "

"I'll make it easy for you…" he clapped my shoulder again as he passed behind me on the way to the door. When he passed through it, another form visibly joined him through the thin rectangular window. There was a metallic click which signified a lock being turned. The nurse who'd locked the door peered at me with a cocked brow.

In any other circumstance, I would've laughed at Gordon's small self-depreciating smile. Instead, I examined my bloody thighs with slouched shoulders. I was fatigued and deeply unhappy that I would have to sit on the sidelines. But if there was one person other than myself I trusted to care for Blaze, it was Gordon.

If only to keep myself from falling asleep, I scooped up the change and stumbled over to the nearest vending machine. I scanned for Oreos as I leaned against it, thumbing in dimes and nickels. Oreos were Blaze's favorite. My knuckles were puckered and my body rang with different brands of pain.

There was a muffled jingling that sounded when I was straightening up from retrieving my find. Gordon pushed through the door to the break room. He slammed what appeared to be a bloody phone down in the table nearest me.

He shouldn't have been back so fast. Though a wide pit of dread was forming in my stomach, I brought myself to ask, "What did he say?"

"The kid's throat got slit, he won't be saying _any_ thing anymore. This," he shook the phone at me, nostrils flared, "was in his fist. Something tells me it's for you."

* * *

Blaze

There was a couple moments when McCreery just weighed the keys in his palm, gray eyes low. Another pair of feet lumbered in. I was mildly surprised to discover the owner of the feet. The man who Blake and I attacked the day before stood in the doorway, equipped with a sardonic smile and a small red first aid kit. The diffused sunlight made a lighter darkness of his deep brown eyes. He was wider than he was tall, his skin a deep and pleasant brown.

The thought to ask him for help came and fell away from me in the same moment as he snidely commented, "New shorts?"

He was referring to my nakedness. I couldn't help myself, "New shirt?"

His lips twitched. "Uncuff her."

McCreery stood with considerable effort and fell back to the ground again at my side. His fingers slipped a little on my blood when he tried to steady the handcuff. The pad of his thumb brushed my wrist when, after a couple fumbling moments, the cuffs peeled away from me. I hissed with relief and moved away from him.

The first aid kit thudded onto my lap. "Bathroom's behind you."

Standing was painful, walking was agony. I waddled to the bathroom in perhaps the most undignified manner possible, trying to cover my bare ass with the edge of Blake's shirt. The door shuddered on its hinges behind me. I fell onto toilet, taking a good long piss before I stood on the uneven ceramic tiles that constituted the shower floor. My muscles were locked for several minutes as I fully anticipated one of the three assholes to barge in. Instead, I heard two of the assholes' muffled conversation from the adjacent room. A door slammed downstairs. I suspected The Joker had left.

With the threat of danger apparently faded, I eyed the hard water and grime-stained shower. Though dirty, it was far from the filth of the bathroom from yesterday. There were several drugstore-brand shower supplies on the windowsill above my head. The bathroom was very normal and very lived-in with toothbrushes and other cleansing products cluttering the sink area. I wondered if it belonged to a random Gothamite before The Joker selected it for my captivity. The window was milky, small and too high for me to reach, much less climb through.

Never tearing my gaze from the splintered white wood of the door, I peeled off Blake's shirt and tossed it onto the small blue carpet just outside the shower. I pinched off my shoes at the heel. I slid the semi-opaque shower door closed. I turned the water as hot as I could get it and let the punishing stream blast onto my back. I cupped some water in my palm and drank periodically throughout my shower, which I kept short for obvious reasons. The soaps were masculine-smelling and didn't do much to exorcise the coat of oily grime I felt in the areas The Joker touched. I always kept an eye on the door. The wounds on my legs and feet all seemed to be in varying stages of infection. Looking down, I was hard-pressed to find a part of my body not marred by inky black and blue.

When I was sure I wouldn't be barged in on, I let myself cry. I toweled myself semi-dry and slipped Blake's very ripe shirt back over me. I pulled on my Converse just in case I had to run though they felt a little ridiculous with no bottoms. While the bathroom wasn't as austere as the adjacent room, The Joker made sure there was nothing of use for me. I rummaged through the medicine cabinet and loose bottles beneath the basin of the sink, but found nothing more useful than a shaving cream canister.

More to stave off the panic than for my health, I tackled the massive task of addressing my many injuries. I paid special attention to the slice over my cheekbone – I'd be damned if I let myself get another facial scar – and my stab wound. The medical kit didn't have half the bandages I'd need to be thorough.

I resolved myself to spend as long as possible locked in the bathroom. I sat with folded arms on the toilet and stared at my unevenly bruised face in the mirror across from me. I remembered who I was before and after McCreery raped me. I thought about all the pain and healing, the meds and the rape test kit. The first day that I spent without thinking once about McCreery was three years after the trial and it was the first time Blake had asked me on a date. We sat on the roof of the orphanage and blew smoke from our first cigarettes into the hazy night. It was the same roof Blake had tried to throw himself off of when he was eleven.

The door rattled and, after a moment, the henchman from earlier stepped through. He cocked an eyebrow at me when I stood, anticipating an attack. He plopped another Styrofoam plate of fucking rice and beans onto the sink as well as another bottle of water.

"Do you shit heels buy rice and beans in bulk or something?"

He leveled me a humorless grin. I was a little insulted that he didn't seem concerned that I could attack him. "Look, I couldn't give two shits if you stay in here or watch TV downstairs but I can't let you leave the house. Are you gunna give me any trouble?"

 _Of course, I am._ "I need more clothes."

"Yeah? Well, you can look the room right next to this one. There should be some clothes in there that will fit you."

"Who lived here before?"

"Me."

I tried to keep the surprise out of my voice. "You don't look like my size. Did a woman live here with you? A daughter?"

His eyes were narrow, "A little brother."

"Would your little brother want you to hold me hostage?"

His response sounded more like a laundry list than anything, "My little brother has a roof over his head because of The Joker. If you want to wave your ass around, eventually men like The Joker are going to take notice. What he does with you is his business. Plus you and your friend didn't exactly get on my good side. Now are you going to behave or do I have to lock you in here?"

My pause was a moment too long to be convincing. "I'll behave."

The man rolled his eyes and extended a hand behind him to grab the door handle. I jolted forward, landing harder than I would've liked on my bad leg. I was met with a door in my face, the sound of a twisting lock, and the sound of something being braced against the door.

"I'll behave let me _out_!"

His heavy footsteps fell away from me. I braced my whole weight against the door but it wouldn't budge. _I'd kill to not be the height of a fucking ten year old right now._

I did another sweep of the room to assure there were no routes for escape. I eventually broke down and ate the flavorless rice and beans. I settled into the tub next to the shower so I could have a good view of the door as I waited. Sleep seized me, seeming to sense I was on the verge of a breakdown.

I woke to a hand slapping to the back of my neck. I was shoved into the wall next to the bathtub so hard I swore I felt my scapula crack. A pile of fabric was pushed into my hands all before I was fully awake. Pain beset my leg as I landed awkwardly. I caught myself on the basin of the tub, glaring at him incredulously as I covered my bottom half. I was angry most of the time, but if there was one situation that I was particularly pissed off about it was this one. I was getting manhandled by a psychotic clown who'd nearly raped me and harmed Blake multiple times while barely awake.

"God, what the fuck is wrong with you?" The Joker inspected himself in the mirror, slicking his evenly-dyed hair back with the short blade of a knife.

"Someone's _grumpy_. Don't tell me you're still upset about _yes_ terday? That was me holding _back_." _Yesterday? I slept through the night?_ "Don't ever say I never _did_ anything for you, Blazey," he tapped the clothes in my hand before facing himself in the mirror once more, inspecting his vile makeup. "Get dressed. Got a _little_ something _special_ planned for today."

 _He's in a good mood. That's probably bad._ I clutched the clothes to my chest, still hyperaware of my nakedness. "Are you going to leave so I can change?"

His black eyes slipped sideways. Lazily, his gaze touched at my barely-covered bottom half. I stiffened. His eyes were hooded just as they were mere hours before when he jerked my shorts off.

He closed the distance between us, intrigued by my flinching. I couldn't have been more aware of our massive height difference as he rested a forearm to the wall above my head. I had to tilt my chin up to meet his eyes. The door was ajar to his back.

He tasted his scars again before issuing me a chilling smile, "Door's open, cupcake."

I pressed my lips together at his cockiness. He didn't think I could escape.

I jolted to move around him. I barely made it a step before his arm fell like an iron bar around my waist and yanked me back beneath the smothering cage of his body.

My breath shook as I glared at his lapel. A knife pressed into my ribs, as it had at the phone booth during my first abduction. I was frozen. The Joker's hungry gaze was consuming after his small victory.

"You smell good, cupcake. Almost as good as you _taste_."

My face twitched, my jaw squeaking it was clenched so hard. I wanted to think of a way out of it, to fight him back, but my mind couldn't break its focus from the short blade creeping down to my midthigh. His sticky smell might as well have been a hand squeezing my throat.

"Get that fucking knife away from me." My voice was weak, afraid. I usually let me anger speak for me, but my fear was consuming in that moment when I was so dreadfully close and exposed to him.

His head twisted inquisitively at the uncharacteristic waver in my word. He tasted his scars again. "I was going to play _nice_ today, sweet pea, but hearing you mouth off to me while cowering half-naked in the corner isn't doing you any _fav_ ors. Now get _dressed_."

He shrugged away from me and slapped down on the lip of the bathtub. If only to put me on edge, he started playing target practice with the wood of the cabinet beneath the sink. He grasped the hilt of a midlength knife which he unearthed from inside of his jacket before letting it embed in the thin space between the cabinet doors. After a moment of uncertainty, I tried to zip past him and into the shower. I hissed at the bite of a blade against the back of my thigh but I resolved myself.

Just as I tried to slam shut the shower door for privacy, The Joker sank a knife into the door jam. The door bounced back violently upon encountering the hilt, shuddering on its hinges. The Joker's towering shoulders filled the door frame, leaving me no room for escape.

He appraised me hungrily as he yanked the knife out of the door jam. He ran a gloved finger along the unsharpened edge of the knife. I made fists with the clothes in my hands. "Did you really think that would work?"

I snarled at him, tired of the game of cat and mouse. I showed him my back. I shrugged off Blake's shirt, my face flushing with frustration when I heard The Joker's appreciative grunt. I felt his eyes touch to me as physically as fingers. I chucked on a plain white shirt that was entirely too tight for comfort. The shorts were my same black shorts that The Joker kidnapped me in, apparently retrieved from the corner of the room where he tossed them yesterday. I wasn't given any sort of underwear or bra. I folded my arms across my breasts, which might as well have been bare in the thin and intimate fabric. I bent to retrieve Blake's shirt but The Joker plucked it from my fingers.

"You won't be needing this."

The Joker looked pleased with himself, inviting me to exit the shower by stepping aside. I huffed passed him and through the bathroom door before I came to a heart-stopping halt. I didn't know what I expected to see set up for my next run-in with The Joker, but it certainly wasn't McCreery being strapped to a chair with an array of weapons at his feet.

The Joker's chest touched to my shoulder blades as he explained, "Today's going to be a day of _expansion_ for you, cupcake. Finally gunna get you over all that turmoil from the past."

My eyes flicked around the room, first absorbing the glow of the recording camera to my left, which was wide enough back to display both mine and McCreery's uneasy forms. The Joker snatched my arm and yanked me forward. I eyed the blades, brass knuckles and baseball bat at my feet as The Joker released me.

"Beat it, Dopey," The Joker shooed away the henchman who'd been busying himself with duct taping McCreery's left wrist the wooden armrest. Dopey stepped slowly so he was standing behind me. I tried to keep him in my periphery.

"I thought you said if I did what you said you wouldn't hurt me," McCreery nervously interjected, eyeing him up. He wasn't panicking yet despite his compromising position. _Dumb shit actually trusts The Joker._

"Has anyone ever told you you have _excellent_ listening skills?" There was the squelch of duct tape winding around McCreery's only free limb. The Joker severed the roll with a twist of his teeth before chummily jostling McCreery's shoulder, "So while we're _here_ , let me ask you something. Have you taken any other little tikes were no little tikes should go?"

McCreery's eyes darted between us. His indecision evident, he still managed to tell the truth solely out of fear, "Yes, only one. I haven't been out for long."

"And how old was she?"

"Ten."

My heart seemed to sink, "You motherfucker," I whispered. Another life ruined, another little girl who would never trust again. He spoke without remorse, the only expression in his voice panic for himself. Seeing him struggle as he was, helpless and lame, standing next to a true terror like The Joker I'd nearly forgotten what a vile monster McCreery was.

"What's her name?" I asked. The least I could do was seek her out when all of this was over. The Joker was watching me a low light in his eyes.

"I don't know, I never found out! What is going _on_?!" His voice was reaching and he fidgeted in his chair.

"Would you do it again if I let you go?"

The skin over McCreery's cheekbone twitched. Pale silver found me erratically. He was piecing together what was going to happen next, what The Joker was leading up to. I had to admit, there was a part of me that felt almost euphoric standing over him as I was. The thought that had occurred to me thousands of times in my life occurred to me once more: Everyone seems to have one tragedy in their lives. McCreery was my second. I would've been normal had I only had to deal with my parent's death as my tragedy. I likely would've gotten adopted without the lack of trust, depression and scars he'd left me with. I would've had a family.

He remained silent for a beat too long. There was meaty crunch as a blade sank through the back of McCreery's hand and then the wooden armrest. McCreery's entire face turned the color of paper. He must've been at risk for popping blood vessels his scream was so loud. His body convulsed. I squeezed my eyes shut tight.

Though it wasn't me who inspired his pain, I felt better hearing the verbalization of his agony than I had for days.

The Joker need only grin down at McCreery for him to erupt in a gasp, "Yes, okay, I would go after another girl! It's a compulsion, I can't control it! You said you wouldn't kill me if I did everything you said! God, don't fucking kill me," I opened my eyes to find McCreery sobbing. I could only stare. I couldn't believe how little remorse I felt for this human being bleeding in front of me, at the mercy of a madman.

The Joker shoved his painted face inches from McCreery's, petting his cheek emphatically, "Sh, sh, sh. Just one more question, Pervy. What did you intend to do with Blaze once you found her at the bank?"

"I... wanted to kill her, okay? Can you let me go now?! Why is she _here_?!"

The Joker rolled his eyes and slapped a strip of tape over McCreery's mouth, breaking me from my reverie. I stumbled back a step and brought the steel back into my expression. The Joker looked a little too smug for my liking.

 _He wants you to feel this way. He wants you to be a monster like him. That's why he's asking McCreery questions that remind you what a sick fuck he is._

"His screams aren't as fun as yours. No," The Joker kneaded McCreery's shoulders over the back of the chair. McCreery's eyes were wide and reeling, eyebrows knitted together, "You two are going to be my Guinea pigs. The stunning Blazey over here is going to be the cop and Pervy McCreepy is playing the robber. Can you guess how this game's gunna play, cupcake?" Having apparently spent too much time not making me uncomfortable, his knuckles brushed against the bandage on my cheek.

I shook him off and, to my genuine surprise, he let me take a couple steps away from him. "You want me to beat him up or you're going to rape me. I fucking hate him so you think you're doing me a favor and I'll kill him for you. And you get to keep your stupid fucking 'word' because _I'll_ be the one to kill him."

The Joker took a step toward me, still grinning. I faltered a step back. "At-ta-ta, cupcake. If you want to beat him up feel _welcome_ to, but if you don't kill him I might just let _him_ play cop."

I felt my face distinctly drain of color. "If I don't kill him you're going to tie me to a chair and let him kill me?"

He pouted down at me, "Oh, the _arro_ gance. Do you _really_ think an injured hundred pound, five foot little bird would need to be strapped down? Did you forget the last time you two went head to head? You barely stand a chance with him strapped down and a _knife_ through his hand. Look," he earnestly placed a hand close to my neck on my shoulder. I winced away from him. My back bumped against something. I hadn't noticed, but The Joker had been backing me up so he could tower over me against the wall. His hand turned into a claw, this thumb running threatening along the column of my throat. Dopey was visible in the gap between The Joker's arm and torso, fidgeting with his jacket. I glared up at The Joker, wondering whether or not I'd be so hesitant if he was the one strapped to the chair. "Between you and me, I'm _root_ ing for you. Which is why I strapped _You Know Who_ down," he pointed to McCreery using his body to hide his hand from McCreery's sight. "I just want you to leave this part of your past _behind_. I made this _so_ easy for you."

By design, The Joker never gave me easy choices in our terrible games. My only relief from the constant mental and physical assault from him was the fact that this game didn't involve rape. I had to wonder what inspired the change. He mentioned that we were Guinea pigs. I wondered if there were other victims in other houses cowering in wait of The Joker's return or if this experiment would happen on a grander scale.

I said it as soon as I realized it, "You want me to choose to kill him without the threat of rape like usual. You want me to be a sick asshole like yo - !"

That seemed all he needed to spoil his good mood. A hard hand to my jaw silenced me. I struggled to maintain his gaze against the clench of tears at my throat. Rage bloomed and I fought against him only to have my hands caged by his body. He pressed the crown of my skull to the wall and put his face inches from mine. His long fingers were strong, furious, my feet barely touching the ground. His voice was a growl that raked against my ears, "I don't _need_ an excuse to fuck you, Plissken."

With that, he all-but threw me toward McCreery, who twisted with renewed vigor. McCreery's eyes begged me for mercy. I swallowed half to clear my tears, half against the memory of our roles reversed.

I eyed the weapons. An idea started to form. I kneeled and plucked the brass knuckles from the floor.


	14. The Come Down

The Come Down

If it came down to it, of course I would kill McCreery. I'd fantasized about killing him more times than I'd sneezed. Though I had no doubt I would struggle to pull the trigger merely for my own humanity's sake, I would do it. I mean, if the giant shit he took on my childhood wasn't enough, I heard it right from his own fucking mouth that he would rape a kid again. That he _has_ raped again.

So please don't misunderstand, I _would_ kill McCreery.

But not like this. Not with him strapped to a chair with The Joker's finger over mine on the trigger. The Joker had insured that I had no clean options like a gun to kill him, that McCreery would have to suffer. So, theoretically I could've killed McCreery right then, beat him to death. But I wouldn't have felt good about it. What was the point of vengeance if it didn't make you feel better?

So there was the whole nasty situation that made me reluctant, and that _did_ genuinely bother me. But the knowledge The Joker would be smug, thinking he'd reduced me to his level... That I couldn't have.

As I balanced the cool metallic weight of the brass knuckles in my palm, I felt in control for the first time in days. I straightened. I felt tall.

McCreery was shaking, his face glistening in the dim light from the boarded windows. His colorless hair clung to his temples and the skin in his bald spot. He leaned the farthest he possibly could away from me in his limited space. If there was one person on whom McCreery could not logically rely to show mercy, it was me.

 _He's afraid of me._

 _He should be._

In his full view, I slid the brass knuckles over my first four fingers. The steel was fresh, unmarred. I could've fit two fingers in each of the holes; the knuckles were obviously designed for men. But they would do.

I wouldn't kill McCreery when he was strapped to a chair, defenseless. But The Joker had a point, I wasn't exactly fit to take on anyone, even McCreery. I wouldn't leave my chances in a fight with him up to chance. I'd have to at least weaken him.

The first punch was surprisingly comfortable. The brass knuckles distributed the force of the hit around my palm so there was no pain on impact. At least on my part. McCreery's head reeled to the side, his lip split when he faced me again with watery eyes. A welt started to engorge itself at the left corner of his mouth. He was pleading with me through the tape. His beseeches were muffled and indistinct. Not that they would do him much good anyway.

"I remember when I pleaded with _you_. You laughed. You backhanded me!" I grunted as I landed a vicious slap. "I had to stare up at the ceiling fan while you raped me! You made me lie to your wife's face while you were in the room about the blood."

This time I felt my whole back ripple when I issued another punch higher, toward his cheekbone. My breath fell heavy.

Thin red liquid slipped down beneath his eye socket. His agonizing eyes circled and flickered, short fingernails digging into the armrest. The knife was still deep in his hand.

" _Aw_!" I jumped at the sound of The Joker's cheery interjection. I'd nearly forgotten his presence, "It's no _fun_ if you nod off after only two punches, Pervy! Show the girl a good _time_!"

I took a moment to look around the room. Dopey was lounged in the corner of the room, looking a little green around the gills. The Joker was circling us and I couldn't shake the image of a shark circling its prey. The particular brand of giddiness he showed made it almost seem as though he knew something I didn't.

Barely breaking my glare from The Joker, I issued another punch to McCreery's jaw. McCreery was no longer pleading. Instead, muffled screams filtered through the tape around his mouth.

I was breathless for a moment, glaring down at McCreery with a heaving chest. The thought came and ebbed away from me that I was the only thing keeping me from killing McCreery right then and there.

It felt more natural when I raised my fist again. McCreery's eyes followed the freshly bloodied brass knuckles. I punched again, this time striking at McCreery's sternum. His whole torso curled in on itself upon impact. A bone cracked. McCreery was spluttering weakly then, head down to his chest.

I touched the bulging hills of steel on my fingers to his chin, angling his battered face toward me. There was a smear of red on his jaw. His fat tears fell onto the back of my hand. For a vile, savory moment I let the ugly part of myself that would be forever raw about my rape swallow the sight of him.

There was a low and satisfied chuckle. I raised my eyes to meet The Joker's as he rested his elbows on the back of McCreery's chair.

"See, Roby? Even Little Miss _Right_ eous can have a mean streak under the right circumstances. Murderous rage suits you, sweetling. You've never looked more beautiful."

I let McCreery's head fall back to his breast bone. I took another moment to fill my lungs with enough air to spit, "I'm done."

McCreery's balding head twitched at my words, managing to tilt up so he could gage my expression through puffy eyes.

The Joker's smile faltered ever so slighty. _Thought you had me, didn't you, asshole_? He shrugged away from the back of McCreery's chair and situated himself behind me.

He saw me brace myself. I twisted toward him, aiming toward his chest with my reinforced fist. He claimed my wrist with relative ease, bending it behind my back. His chin rested in the hollow of my collarbone. His voice was frustratingly delighted as always, though there was an edge to it, "Wanna say that again so the whole _class_ can hear you, princess?"

My every movement to get away from him sent a shot of white pain up my elbow. I still managed to breathlessly growl, "I said I'm _done_."

"Mmmmm," he murmured, smacking his lips right in my ear, "I knew _you_ couldn't let it be so easy. You _really_ want to play _robber_?"

Peering down at McCreery's suddenly smug, though still recuperating eyes, I couldn't have been more assured, "I want this to be a fair fight."

The Joker couldn't let me have a single dignified moment. He smacked a kiss to the edge of my mouth before snapping out a knife. I clutched my aching arm and twisted my forearm across my chin to wipe away any paint. After four precise cuts, McCreery was yanking the hair out of his wrists and ankles as he peeled off his tape. The knife clattered to the floor as The Joker unearthed the tip from McCreery's palm.

I plucked the baseball bat off the floor and arranged more space between my opponent and I. My brass knuckles made it a little difficult to grasp the handle of the bat with both hands, but I managed.

McCreery raised a hand to his mouth and peeled off the silver covering his vile thin lips. His smile was weak and his face marred with cuts and welts. He spit red on my Converse before he squared his gaze on me. There was bloody dribble on his chin, "Should've killed me when you had the chance, Bee."

 _Bee? Oh, yeah, that was his ex-wife's nickname for me. He thinks he can get in my head._

He stood. He was a smallish man, only taller than me due to my exceptional shortness. His middle was soft, his shoulders sloped and sagging. The Joker's lanky frame loomed over us both.

"I wouldn't be so cocky. You're used to fights with ten year old girls."

He hurled himself at me. His approximation of a battle scream turned his aging face even uglier and pink.

I ghosted to the side. He was assisted in a face plant against the wall by a push of my bat. I punched him as hard as I could in the ribs and darted away. He swiped behind him blindly, clutching his broken nose and grunting.

I smirked, readying my bat once more. There was a metallic clatter as The Joker kicked another bat toward McCreery.

I flicked a withering look at The Joker as McCreery bent to retrieve the new weapon. He exposed his yellow teeth, "You _said_ 'fair.'"

I redirected my attention. McCreery took a swing at my head, which I ducked. I stomped on his foot and aimed the head of the bat at McCreery's gut. He curled in on himself again. But before he fell, he swept an arm out around my waist and dragged me down with him.

We both huffed when we slammed against the floor. He tried to clap his bat down on my face but the movement was awkward and I blocked it with my forearm at the last moment. Still, the tip of the bat slammed against my nose and I gasped against the fresh pain.

McCreery moved on top of me, putting too much weight on my bad leg. I howled as he began banging my fist against the floor to shake the bat out of it. I let the weapon fall out of my hand so I could aim a steel punch to his gut with my other hand. His eyes popped wide and he slouched off to the side. I mounted him and issued another punch to his sternum.

I struck again, starting to let the rest of the world phase into my focus in my periphery. The Joker was tossing a knife into the air and catching it at the farthest left corner of the room. I couldn't decipher his expression without looking up but I could guess he was satisfied, confident in the fact that I would kill McCreery. Dopey had migrated to the toilet seat. The overturned chair rested to my left between the door and I.

I started to let up the power of my punches. McCreery was barely conscious, if that, his eyes slitting open and closed. He still looked pathetic beneath me. I snatched the baseball bat from the floor next to us and pressed the neck of it to his throat. Mostly so I could get closed enough to him so I could whisper, _just_ low enough for him to hear, "Play dead."

I tried to still look occupied as I cocked my bat back in the air. McCreery gasped in air, though the way he eyed me communicated that he understood I was being merciful. I let my bat swoop down, though rather than hit his head, the tip banged against the wooden floor left of his temple. McCreery turned his head as though he'd been hit and let his body go slack.

I huffed in breath over McCreery's immobile form. A dark splotch dotted onto McCreery's white button down. I hadn't realized I was crying until then. His chest still rose and fell quite erratically. I didn't have long before The Joker saw he was alive.

I stood, one foot on either side of him. My left hand was inches from the wood of the chair.

The Joker shrugged away from the wall. I met his smiling eyes. _I've won_ , his eyes taunted. I supposed it would've looked like that to him.

I split a smile of my own at him. My brass knuckles sliced through the air. The force of the hit was verbalized as a dull and brutal thunk to the edge of The Joker's ghastly scar.

Just before I turned, I got the unique delight of seeing his face twist on impact. I clutched the chair as I peeled toward the closed door. I shoved through it to the shouts of Dopey at my back. Yanking it shut in his face, I twisted the lock and secured the back of the chair beneath the door knob.

Adrenaline drew the pain from my leg like a leech. I flew down the stairs, taking them two at a time. I clambered toward the immediately visible back door but found it to be heavily bolted.

"Fuck!" I grunted in frustration, palming my baseball bat before fumblingly sliding open the three dead bolts at my eye level. There was a massive thump from upstairs followed by the sound of the chair legs scraping against the floorboards.

The back door still wouldn't budge. My eyes popped wide. "What the f…" I trailed off when I saw the dead bolt situated vertically on the top lip of the door frame closest to the ceiling. I took a swipe but I didn't even come close to the handle of the bolt. Though frustratingly simple, the oddly situated obstacle was an elegant insurance method to keep me contained.

Another bang, another scrape. I didn't need intuition to tell me how little time I had before Dopey and The Joker were upon me.

I got two steps to the front door before my feet snapped to a stop. An identical vertical deadbolt mocked me from the top lip of the door, same as the back.

The chair clattered to the floor above me. With no time to spare, I discovered the door immediately to my right to be locked, but with no deadbolt. I knocked the doorknob off with the butt of my baseball bat.

Footsteps clambered. I dashed through the door, losing precious seconds as I palmed blindly in the dark for a light switch. Supersaturated anemic light cast strange shadows on a modest garage. I tossed myself into the thin space separating a wide SUV from a shelf of paint and assorted tools.

The garage door was fixed closed. There was no apparent mechanical device at my disposal to lift the massive obstacle and the chaotic footsteps were drawing closer. I toppled the shelf against the SUV, hoping the blockage in the only path to me would buy me much-needed time. The sound of metal on asphalt as the tools clattered to the floor was stunning in the small space. I would've been worried had I not already compromised my position with the damaged door knob. The clang of my baseball to the ground only added to the cacophony.

The interior of the garage door was composed of horizontal metal poles which were cool to the touch. I put all of my might into raising the heavy fixture blocking my only exit, using the metal bars as handles. My muscles quivered after only a few seconds. The pain in my leg returned full force as I braced it against the front bumper of the SUV to my back for leverage. My hands raised marginally. I peeked down to see only about three inches-worth of light leaking beneath the floor and the rubbery cusp of the door.

I swore again, both in response to the weight of the door and the sound of movement behind the SUV. I peeked back to find Dopey struggling with the weight of the shelf, which rested diagonally across his path.

"Get the fuck back here, little bitch!"

My palms felt unbelievably slick and my face hot as I forced the door up another couple of inches. There was a massive bang as the shelf was forced back up against the wall. The floor was still cluttered with a mass of odd obstacles and paint canisters. Dopey's wide shoulders and fumbling feet didn't do him any favors as he tried to squeeze himself in the crevice.

Still, he was mere feet away. I collapsed onto my back, always careful to keep my arm braced against the door to keep it from falling. I scooped up the baseball bat at my feet. Just as Dopey pushed his torso out from the crevice and began to fall toward me, I rolled myself into the bright Gotham day. There was a burdened rolling sound indicating the door was sliding closed behind me.

A hand grasped my bicep from beneath the door. One of Dopey's dark eyes glared at me madly through the thin space separating the ground and the door. He was screaming at me as though his life rode on my captivity. Perhaps it did. The metal of the door creaked as though he was trying to raise it once more with his other hand. As though he was trying to follow me through.

I brought down the bat as hard as I could against his wrist twice, earning a pained shout and a free arm. The garage door suddenly raised several inches. I jumped vertical and clambered to the outdoors handle of the garage door. I hefted all of my weight onto the handle, pressing the door down just as Dopey's slipped a hand through the opening to pull himself through. His hand convulsed upon impact. It took him a couple moments, but he managed to raise the door enough to pull his arm back inside. His muffled shouts reached me still. I hoped I broke something in his arm.

A shadow fell across mine on the surface of the garage door. An icy pit formed and descended in my stomach.

My knees locked. I anticipated a blow to the back or perhaps even a trademark chilling Joker laugh. Instead, charged silence filled the space between us. I couldn't explain it, but I felt The Joker's smile.

When I twirled back, I swung the bat around with me. He was ready. His forearm absorbed the shock of the hit and his fingers curled around the neck of the aluminum. He crinkled his nose mockingly as I used both hands to pull against his one. The bat didn't even budge in my direction.

Rather than wretch the bat handle from my hand as I knew he could've, he used my death grip to yank the bat and me closer to him.

I knew I should've, but I couldn't bring myself to give up my one and only weapon against him. He often wore his bulky jacket which masked his toned limbs. His forearms were bare in that moment, the sleeves rolled to the elbow to expose the raw muscle rippling as they resisted my tugs.

Both of us seemed to know this would be my last chance to get away. Our eye contact was weighted. Gone was my sense of power and height, replaced by the familiar sense of helplessness I'd become so unaccustomed to in The Joker's presence.

Though he should've been furious that I'd managed to hit him with my brass knuckles and send him on another chase, he never looked more pleased. I almost would've preferred his rage to the intimate look he was giving me then. It was a look I hated and feared. It was a look he gave when he knew he was about to make me squirm. He took a particularly long time tasting his scars before he revered, " _Miss_ Blaze Plissken... You know, I thought about fucking you the _first_ time I saw your little scar. When you snubbed me and reached over to put that sign on the counter I had to physically re _strain_ myself from grabbing your wrist, yanking you over that counter and bending you over that desk. I wanted to fuck you unconscious right in front of that full lobby."

My stomach curled at his vile admission. "Give me. The. Fucking. Bat!" I screamed between tugs. His lifeblood seemed to be in my hot tears. When I changed up my tactics and issued a kick to his shin, he plucked the bat from my grip only to slam the butt of it onto my gut.

My shoulders curled into my abdomen as I fell back. He tossed the bat beneath the silver sedan in the driveway. We both knew he didn't need it. I pushed myself away from him if only to evade his next avenue of conversation, "And that was _before_ you played martyr and jumped in front of your manager at the bank. Before _you_ called _me_ sick," he paused to tilt his head back and touch his chest as though he was describing the best thing he'd ever tasted, "Before I heard that _delicious_ scream."

His foot stomped on my injured calf. I collapsed into the mulch and released an involuntary scream through the bars of my teeth.

"Mmmm," he appreciated as the end of my scream fell around us. "Like a _gulp_ of cold water."

Bits of mulch embedded themselves in my palms and knees as I struggled to stand once more. I took a desperate swipe at his leg the sole of my foot, which landed but without much force. The Joker's tongue split through his painted lips again as he stalked me further. I scuttled back, but for every foot I managed to get away from him he gained two on me. My chances of escape were diminishing. I had to draw attention.

"Help me! The J - !"

The toe of his shoe pushed against my throat, just hard enough to pinch off my windpipe. My face pounded with blood for a couple seconds before The Joker mockingly rose his foot. I gasped and was able to rasp another couple syllables before my airways were closed off once more.

"Don't waste them on passerby. Those screams belong to _me_."


	15. Degausser

Degausser

The Joker

 _Today is a good day._

Preparations for my greatest Gotham game yet were going better than one could hope. Harvey Dent's insanity suited him so well it was a little scary, he'd already killed one public servant and had a lead on his next. I nipped a threat at the hospital in the bud and managed to deliver to Blake my next video in one fell swoop.

And Blaze was afraid of me.

A fumbling crab walk was the best she could muster to get away from me after I'd stomped her calf. She keened pathetically as she scuttled away. Her small shorts had pulled up a bit to expose a good portion of her supple ass. She really did have a shape that could kill. Her waist was the width of my hand finger-to-wrist, her hips wide and her legs toned but shapely. Her hair was wild from being freshly washed, long and fiery as it swayed against the superior half of her back.

Inky blacks and blues that touched from her bandaged feet to her sliced cheek. She bruised like a peach, fitting considering she tasted like one. My pants tightened a bit. There were light rumbles coming from the sky to tarnish the bright Gotham day and for every step I took the sky seemed to marginally darken.

Oh, the effect that little thing had on me. Every bite of sass and every show of fear seemed to travel directly to my groin. It was like I was a middle schooler again, getting a hard-on when a girl I liked gave me a hug.

Those delightfully tearing hazel eyes flew wide when her back thumped to the front door. She was easy enough to herd, more concerned about getting away from me than where she was going. I rapped my knuckles loudly against wood above her head and it took seconds for the splintered wood to vanish from behind her. Dopey viciously claimed a handful of her hair and needed no prompting from me to tow her inside. He was clutching the hand she'd slammed in the garage door close to his chest.

She cried out again at Dopey's death grip. I licked my lips.

"Bring me McCreepy and my camera." I commanded as I lightly nudged the door closed. I slid the many deadbolts into place. My fingers lingered on the perpendicular deadbolt that even I had to stretch to reach. I'd have to get one for the internal garage door.

I arrived back to my begrudging beau with a skip in my step. Dopey had deposited her on the couch and was stalking up the steps to fulfill my orders. He flicked a heavy gaze to the back of Blaze's copper head.

Our knees were inches apart as I perched directly opposite Blaze on the coffee table. Like a dog cornered, she snarled at me through knitted brows and darted a gaze around her. I dared her to move with a twitch of my lips. As we stared each other down, assaulting rainfall clambered against the window just behind me, casting her face in a halo of cool wavering light.

Her chest heaved. The dim lighting leeched the color from her. It turned the rich pigment of her blood and hair into black, made her eyes appear a cool muted brown instead of their usual searing goldish green. Her rounded face was unnaturally ashen, her light freckles showing like pepper in snow. Darkness coated the inside of one of her nostrils and smeared down over her two full lips, a result of the fight with McCreery. If you could even call it that. As usual, I'd grossly underestimated her resourcefulness. The edge of my jaw throbbed where her brass knuckles had kissed, the hidden diagonal slash she'd issued across my chest twinged with pain at my every twist.

Her posture rang with discomfort and then stiffened with genuine fear as I resumed tossing my knife in the air and letting it fall into my palm. The only thing she seemed to hate more than knives was me. My gaze touched to her cream thighs between throws and she fidgeted, pressing her knees together.

"You keep finding ways out of my _games_."

The corner of her upper lip twitched. "Is that a question?"

I plucked my knife from the air with particular grandeur. She visibly struggled not to flinch. It would be so easy for me to slip that blade through her simple little skull. I'd been tempted to do so a thousand times over. I hated how much practice I was getting with restraint, but I had to make my Blaze's fire last. It wouldn't do to slice that taut throat before I had my fun. You wouldn't chug a whole bottle of $500 wine in night, would you? No, a true martyr was rare, and all wrapped up in that pretty little package, her fiery soul was rarer still.

"You could've killed him but you didn't. All those _emp_ ty promises... all those times you said you'd kill me."

"I _will_ kill you."

I didn't know if I would ever verbalize it to her, but there was a part of me that respected her resolve. By now, even the most martyred of men would've been broken or at least not so quick on the draw with the death threats.

McCreery's limp body arrived at my feet with a fleshy thump. Dopey sat the camera down to face Blaze and I, his chest heaving from dragging McCreepy.

I snatched Dopey's bad hand and deposited my knife in it.

"Let's _see_ what the inside of his throat looks like."

His gaze darkened, but he painstakingly shifted the knife from his bad to his good hand. The kid was new and still in his trial period. Mostly, I'd just recruited him for his house and drug habit. He wasn't my usual mental case, but he was still easily manipulated what with a brother and aunt for whom I paid rent. I didn't need to go through the whole gauche conversation for him to understand that it was him or McCreery. It took the kid a minute, but soon I was listening to the distinct sound of thin steel through flesh. The sound wasn't particularly satisfying to me - I much preferred the build up to the death over the death itself.

Hazel eyes remained unswervingly fixed to mine. There were no tears, no revelation that an old enemy was spilling his existence on the carpet feet away. Not that I'd expected tears from her. Righteous though she was, she was a far cry from a saint. She reminded me of the Bat in that way - she was brimming with hate, never afraid to draw blood but she was still weak, still limited in what she'd be willing to do even to her most loathsome foe.

Pouting, I slouched forward to rest my elbows against my knees. She jolted away from me so she was flush with the couch. Her hands shook. She crossed her arms across her pert little breasts.

"I might be going away for a while, princess, which I know breaks your _heart -_ "

"Let me guess - another fucking game."

I splayed my arms wide. She jolted at my abrupt movement. "You know me so _well_ , Blaze Plissken! Now, I've tossed these two ideas around a lot and I just can't _decide_ which one I want more. I mean, either way, I will be fucking your little cunt raw and there's just nothing that can be done about that. _So_ , I either take you right now and you can save me a trip to Robin to deliver the final _tape_ ," _and then I'll let you choose if you want me to kill you or not_ , "Or you can cling to that _little_ false hope that you'll somehow escape and I'll come back for you when my business with the Bat is attended to.""

Something flickered in her eyes, something delicious that I was not supposed to see. The beginnings of fear, of hopelessness.

 _Today_ is _a good day._

She measured me with low eyes, her pupils pinprick sized. She knew there was a catch. The subcutaneous thump of her erratic pulse in on the bruised white column of her throat was visible.

"The only problem _is_ I'll have to leave you with Dopey here. I have no idea how long I might be gone. Could be just another day, could be a _week_. And I'm just not _ready_ to lose you again. _So_... if you should choose to wait I'm going to have to make sure you can't even _stand_. "

"Doesn't the _doctor_ have the dismiss you from the asylum?"

She actually wasn't far off the mark. My face off with Batman was equally likely to land me in the morgue or the madhouse. "Not when you have a get out of jail free card. Don't worry your pretty little head about it, sweet cheeks, I'll be back for you."

"Blake will come for me in that time."

"Oh, yes, your _knight_. One of my men caught a glimpse of him stewing over a vending machine choice in a hospital. Snickers or Lays, Snickers or Lays..." I crooked a smile that made her snarl deepen. "He was taking a break from stalking one of my men who just got out of a coma. My buddy would've known where you are and I'm sure that he would've told Roby, too."

" _Would've_ ," she echoed bleakly.

"Well. I couldn't make it too easy on Blakey boy, could I? If I _time_ everything right, he won't find you until I'm done with you, if at all."

Her gaze flicked to the red dot above the camera, as it had time and time again. She was thinking about yelling out what she knew about our location. She knew I would never allow the information to reach him, though. She faced me again.

"He'll find a way."

"God, you're like one of those dolls that only says three phrases when you pull its string. 'Fuck you,' 'Blake will find me,' 'I'll kill you.' Kind of a _violent_ doll brand."

"Yeah, I don't care about the whole 'you won't be able to stand' fuckery. I'll wait, asshole. I'll wait for you to come back then I'm going to make you eat your fucking teeth."

"Peachy!"

I skipped to the reeking kitchen. A burner cracked unevenly as it cooked the bottom of a cast iron skillet. I plucked a stained oven mitt from above the stove and retrieved the handle of the skillet through the thick insulation.

I shrugged back into the living room. Blaze was twisting in Dopey's grip. He was pinning her shoulders to the couch with one hand. She released a whimper when she noted my haul from the kitchen. There was calculation in that gaze before she twisted like an animal caged and sunk the top row of her teeth into Dopey's wrist.

Dopey howled, yanking his wrist away before issuing her a backhand that surely rebloodied her nose. She slumped and spluttered against the armrest of the couch. My fist tightened around the handle of the skillet.

"Hold or tie her down, I don't care which. And she's talkative today, she's gunna need a gag."

The strip of fabric Dopey shredded from the bottom of his t-shirt was about as effective as melted butter on diamond against her screams. Cast iron, white hot from sitting on the open flame since I'd gotten to the house, barbecued the bottom of her feet with an audible sear. Her howls were that of a woman burning in hell, and perhaps she was as she saw her chances of escape slip into the realm of impossibility.

Just when I got started on her second foot, her shouts died in her throat and her limb's tension dissolved under my hands. Dopey shuffled away to lick his wounds, the need for restraint passed. When the bottom of both of her tiny feet were bubbling blackness, I stood. The skillet thudded onto McCreepy's still back. My shoes squelched in his blood.

Her unconscious form was the picture of torment. Tears caught on her long dark eyelashes and turned the skin of her cheeks tight and shiny. That telling white line divided her full bottom lip, separated from the top lip with the remnants of her howls. Strands of fire fell across her forehead and mouth and her pale wrists were still crossed delicately above her head where Dopey pinned them.

Running a thumb in the hollow of her cheekbone, I addressed Dopey, "Bring her back to the bathroom upstairs. You can have your booboo looked at when you've done your chores."

* * *

Blake

Malcolm Jones, a thirty-four year old career criminal and documented sick fuck, was dead. As was my singular lead on Blaze's whereabouts. The bastard _did_ take a good amount of time to finally die, though. That only added insult to injury as I'd managed to cultivate a foolish hope that he would somehow pull through and tell us the information we needed out of spite.

 _So much time wasted._

There were moments like this where I _would've_ wondered if my Blaze was suffering, but The Joker had made such a luxury impossible. His latest video had made me sick within the first three minutes. Gordon had watched the rest of it as I puked into the trash can before sending it for analysis. Her tormented screams still reached me.

The descending elevator button creaked in protest I laid on it so hard. There was a ding and a small mass of bodies encroached on me. I shoved through and slammed a hand on the ground floor button. I gripped the handrail as the elevator doors approached one another.

My bloodshot eyes were visible in the chrome of the elevator walls. I took a good long breath and, when that was ineffective, I unloaded a punch to the metal reflecting my battered face. Tears smarted at the welcomed pain in my abused knuckles.

No sooner had I pulled my fist back did the doors shudder open once more. For a brief moment, I faltered. _Did I break the elevator?_

More bodies shuffled through into the small compartment. I continued to face the elevator wall despite the gazes I felt touch to my back.

I continued to stare at the untarnished metal, trying to reign my breathing under control. Then I caught sight of him in the reflection.

The familiar man's face was a fragment of a thunderstruck memory. From my escape from The Joker a mere thirty hours before. It was the same man who'd come to Blaze and I with a plate of food, the same one who'd so carelessly left the door ajar. I stiffened. He didn't notice me.

There was a stout woman between him and I, providing me some measure of separation. I inspected his profile. His head was close shaven, his dark skin and full lips crinkled with impatience or perhaps annoyance. He held one of his wrists to his chest as though it was injured.

The elevator dinged once more and the henchman pushed through the doors. I followed him through the doors without hesitation. I glared down the man's back as he brusquely moved through the lobby doors and into the hospital parking lot. The churning Gotham night was the color of charcoal though the rain had thankfully reduced itself to a spittle.

The henchman began to weave his way between the cars, wide shoulders cast down against the light haze of moisture. He still clutched his arm to his chest.

Peeking around myself to assure no one had taken notice of my behavior, I painfully slouched behind car after car as I trailed him. My efforts at stealth were unnecessary, however, as the henchman was wholly focused on his destination.

Finally, he reached it. He fumbled with the door handle of a black SUV, pawing through the center console.

My feet paused when I slunk up behind him to observe to his muttering, "Fucking can't even get my arm looked at without my fucking phone just in case that evil prick needs me. Fucking ridiculous. Where the hell..."

I made the click of my gun's safety loud and clear, right next to his temple. His long fingers froze.

"Hands up."

Two palms stretched wide to either side of the man's head. A gory crescent was visible on the man's damaged wrist.

"That bite mark. Who gave it to you? Where's the girl? Where is Blaze Plissken?!"

"Hey, man, calm down. Can I turn around?"

"Sure. But first you're going to tell me where she is."

"You know I can't do that."

I pistol-whipped the guy so hard _I_ felt pain. He collapsed into the passenger seat, bald head thumping against the center console. I hefted his legs into the car with him then rounded the back of the hulking vehicle.

I popped the trunk, hoping against hope she would be stored away inside. Instead, the trunk was cluttered with several bags of men's clothes and discarded food wrappers of all sorts. I glared down at the odd bits. _Did I really think she'd be here? I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing._

"What do you think you're doing?"

I spun on my heel, leveling my gun in a motion that was becoming second nature.

Gordon only had time to twitch toward the handle of his own pistol before I let my weapon fall to my side. "Don't sneak up on people, it's going to get you shot."

"I could say the same to you. I presume he's one of The Joker's?"

With a withering glare, I approached the driver's side of the car. "You're a lieutenant now, Gordon. Wouldn't you say the less you know, the better?"

"You know I can't let you leave this parking lot with that man."

He grabbed the door as I tried to slam it closed. My gun was back in his face. "You can say I took him by force."

Gray eyes flicked between the barrel of the gun and I. "You know I have to report this."

With a hard yank, the door left his grip and settled closed. I didn't have to say it aloud for him to know he could tell Batman or God himself for all I cared.

"You've got the look of a man starved, Robin." Always keeping my gun on him, I plucked the keys from beneath the henchman's feet. I didn't think I would _actually_ shoot him. I mostly kept the gun up for the sake of any observing cameras.

"Call me Blake."

A hand clapped my arm as I thundered the car to life. "The last thing this city needs is another dead body. Don't do anything Blaze wouldn't."

"There's nothing Blaze wouldn't do for me. She almost got raped to make sure I wouldn't get hurt. We protect each other." I shifted the car into reverse and began to back out. Gordon released my arm as I backed away from him. I stashed my gun back in its holster and tried not to look at Gordon's form in the rear view mirror as it briefly chased me.

"This will reset all the good you've done, Blake! This will change everything!"

I did so tire of Gordon's fatherly persistence, I never found it as charming as Blaze did.

I glanced down at the bite mark on the man's inner arm as I turned out of the parking lot. Heavy discoloration circled his forearm and there seemed something off about the set of his limb. I assumed it was broken.

She broke that man's arm and laid that nasty bite on his arm, somehow I was sure of it. My fighter, ever worthy of her name, would've been more worried about drawing blood at this point than getting away.

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

 **Thank you so much for reading! I hope you're all doing well in the new year. I thought I'd let you lovely people know that I've thoroughly appreciated your patronage and reviews! This story has been such a fun reprieve from my schoolwork of late and though I will admit it's drawing to a close I can assure you all that each of the characters will stay true to themselves. I couldn't be more excited to show you all where these TDK characters end up in my reimagination of their universe. Please let me know if you have any questions or recommendations! Thank you again!**


	16. Where It Begins

Where It Begins

Blake

The same day as The Joker's imprisonment

I'll be the first to admit it. I got carried away.

The henchman was still cognizant enough to feign indifference to the threat I posed to him. Lips spat red on my shoes before they formed words that made my world stagger to its knees, "You should be thankful you got away. Your girl is locked away right now not fifteen miles from the heart of Gotham, her little feet practically burned to a crisp. She won't even be able to so much as blink without feeling pain. And, apart from The Joker, I'm the only one who knows where she is. I was the only thing keeping her alive until The Joker returned."

" _What_ do you mean _burned_? _You burned her_?!"

His laugh was short, rimmed with pain, and decidedly fake, "Don't believe me? I have two phones in my pocket." I dug through his front pockets and did, indeed, find two phones.

I allowed my exhausted form to collapse into the corner of the room, the restrained man forgotten. His heaving breath mixed with mine in the staunched room. I took a moment to pull myself past my thick dread as I weighed the devices in either palm. _She needs you._

The first phone was locked by password. I tossed the useless item nowhere in particular. The second phone had the video preloaded. After a shaky exhale, I thumbed the play button.

Blaze was growing ever-smaller beneath the weight of the new evils. Her copper curls quivered along with her as The Joker let no opportunity go unclaimed to push, threaten and coerce her. His newest proposal, at least, didn't inherently involve sexual assault. Though I struggled to stabilize my trembling hand, I was only somewhat sick as I watched her pummel McCreery. If I knew her less, I would believe she was truly unhinged. No, I saw the cogs turning in between punches. So I was unsurprised when she made her move.

True sickness started to bloom when I noted The Joker's half-lidded eyes after Blaze threw her brass knuckles at him and scampered out the door. He rolled out his neck with a dark chuckle and palmed the front of his pants to the camera. The henchman assaulted the door in the background, "Me and Little Joker _love_ it when she fights-sah."

My reflection in the phone screen snarled.

And then it cut to her, soaked to the bone in sweat. She didn't appear to have any fresh injuries despite her apparently unsuccessful escape attempt. He was situated directly across from her on a coffee table, looking cocky enough to have just taken out an entire army by himself.

I released another breath when Blaze's steel gaze flicked to McCreery's spluttering face in his last moments. She couldn't have looked colder.

And then my hellcat was wide-eyed and dreading being hurt again. It was the same Blaze who'd snatched my extended hand while my feet half-hung off the cusp of the orphanage roof a lifetime ago. She tried to dart out of the room as soon as The Joker was no longer obstructing her path. The henchman weighed a large palm on her shoulder to keep her still. It was my Blaze that cried out as The Joker pinned her feet down. They were the same small freckled feet that had entangled themselves in mine as she held me and I talked on that rooftop. She was the _only_ one who would listen back then.

Her head whipped to the side as the pain oh-so-gingerly touched to her skin. It was the same precious head that my tears tumbled onto as I experienced the first of many moments where she was everything.

She screamed like I'd never heard her scream before. Often, her throat infused her shrieks with fear or fury or sadness but this scream was separate, different, sovereign. Her voice was pain verbalized, a manifestation of the fresh horrors. Her head tilted back to its farthest possible position, throat straining to amplify her volume. The camera angle provided an intimate view of the grizzly transformation of the soles of her feet from faintly pink to red and rich black.

When he was done with her, her dreadful screams had long-since died in her throat. I was sure her voice would never sound the same again. Not after that.

The phone shattered against the side of the asshole's smug face. I blacked out between punches. I surfaced only when he was comatose and the left side of his face twice the size of the right side.

My hand was broken. And, with the henchman unconscious, I was no closer to finding Blaze.

* * *

Blaze

Two days after The Joker's imprisonment

I stared at the ceiling so long that the strident white color of it came alive and tried to swallow me. My eyes grew dry; I refused to blink at times. I was scared to move even a fraction of an inch, if only to keep from the impossible pain that lived in my feet. I tried to keep my breath from moving my abdomen, tried to quiet my heartbeat to reduce its flutter on my skin. The house settled from time to time. Apart from my damning heartbeat, it was the only thing I heard at first, and it frightened me every time.

I was gripping something cool and smooth in my right hand. Like a fading dream, I was only dubiously conscious of the fact that it was a piece of glass I'd chiseled from the bathroom mirror that laid in my palm.

Though it had resulted in multiple bouts of pain-induced unconsciousness, I'd managed to drag my aching form to my only sanctuary. The shaving cream canister I'd found beneath the sink only needed one good chuck at the overhead mirror for my ghostly reflection to lay shattered in three uneven pieces on the dirty tiles.

It could've been days or weeks since I hid the shards. I reminded myself what must've been fifty times over where they were hidden.

When I finally did muster up the courage to move, my motion was meaningless. I fingered the calk dividing the gritty tile beneath me with my pinky just for the sake of it. I realized my palm was deeply cut from at some point fisting my fingers around the shard.

 _Where is Dopey? Shouldn't he be feeding me_?

I broke my gaze from the snarling ceiling to glare out the window. Cloudy though it was, the glass permitted me a wavering glimpse of the roiling rainfall. Stunning cracks of lightning made my bones lock in my limbs, inspiring evermore pain from my feet.

I tasted my surely grey lips and closed my eyes against the movement of the rain against the glass.

* * *

Blake

Two days after The Joker's imprisonment

Gordon informed me that The Joker was imprisoned in Arkham Asylum after a defeat at the hands of Batman. Any and all attempts they'd made to extract her location from him, however, were unsuccessful and frequently resulted in blood.

The Bat signal was destroyed. I'd raced to it after a full day of the henchman's unconsciousness. I was desperate. For my best and only friend to be back in my arms, for an end to her suffering, for a savior that I could only dream of being.

Cold, fat raindrops claimed patches of my shoulders and turned a cool Gotham night into a freezing Gotham night. From the police station roof, I begrudgingly inspected the tumbling skyline. The low roof of the orphanage was visible several blocks away. I'd never noticed how close those two pillars in my life were to one another, how little physical space my life had taken up since my parents' death.

I was farther from her than I'd ever be, of that I had no doubt. Wherever she was, she was praying to every god she knew the name of that I would find her.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I leveled it to my ear. I was becoming increasing accustomed to Gordon's clipped tone of voice, "We hunted down the address of the junkie you abducted, no thanks to you. His name is William Mare if you haven't already figured that out. Raided the house listed on his record but all we found was the kid's aunt and brother."

"You raided without me?"

"I just thought you should know so you don't waste your time. Any developments?"

"She's burned, Jim. She won't even be able to run from him anymore."

"You know he's at the asylum, don't you, kid?"

"And just how long do you think those invertebrates can hold him? He's broken out of police custody before and his henchman talks about his escape like it's already happened. I'm not taking any chances. Were there any other addresses listed? Current or former, doesn't matter which."

"None within Gotham city limits, kid. Chances are she's being held at a warehouse."

"Warehouse? No, in the most recent video there was a couch, a kitchen, a TV. The windows were boarded up, it looked like, but you could see branches so the house might be two stories. It looked older, small, probably in a bad neighborhood. Has forensics come back with anything about the videos?"

"It could be another whole week before we hear anything from their side."

He didn't say it. He didn't need to. We could rely on no one else to get Blaze back.

I turned to inspect the henchman's raised eyelids and bloodied cheekbones. "Don't make any more moves toward her without me unless it's absolutely necessary. I want to be there when we – when she… the henchman, Mare, he was there, with her."

"Look, we know how The Joker works. There's no way he didn't threaten the kid's family. There's no physical threats or emotional leverage you could have that would make him willing to sacrifice that family."

"I'll let you know when I have an address."

* * *

Blaze

Day of The Joker's escape

There was a masculine silhouette swallowing the doorway. Tall, wiry. My starving body and decaying mind held tight to one simple thought, in which I was wholly submerged for several stunning moments.

 _Blake_ , my lips formed his name when my throat was too raw to speak it. One of the taut shoulders twitched and the head snapped sideways contemplatively, but the form was otherwise stoic.

The tilt of the head was what did him in. Longish strings of hair diverged from the shape of the neck, different from my Blake's no-nonsense cop cut.

"Princess still asleep in her tower, still dreams of her white _knight-ah."_

 _No,_ my soundless whisper was a tissue in an avalanche, a stick in a flood.

For the thousandth time in the past few days, I felt it in my teeth the need to run, to _get away_ and for the thousandth time, my body threatened me with a most unbelievable pain if I so much as twitched.

The Joker. A spectacular flash of lightning shown his face as naked as it was the first time we met. My eyes traced his deep puckered scars and marveled the darkness in and around his black irises.

My impulsive fraction of a yell made his mouth tilt cruelly.

"Oh, don't worry about that lost scream, princess. I could pull one out of you on my _worst_ day."

I followed his movements through a thick haze as the looming silhouette neared me. I spent long enough away from him that I forgotten the gravelly lilt to his voice, the sharp power he emanated from the set of his brows and the fold of his long hands. Involuntary shivers shot bolts of pain up my legs and made me release an inhuman sound.

 _No, no, no, no, no._

A satisfied grin started to form as he took in my increasingly shaky limbs. He was bouncing on his scrunched up knees like he liked to do. His eyes flicked down to my fists, expecting them to lurch toward him at any moment. "Now, what is _this_ , sweet cheeks?" Hot fingers plucked the shard from my hand, which I'd entirely forgotten. He held it in front of his face and ran his tongue on inside of his ghastly cheeks. He was almost impressed, "Look at _you_ , being able to drag yourself over. _No_ one I've gotten to play with has been able to even _twitch_ with their feet all bubbly and _blek_."

My throat felt like I'd spent my time trying to swallow the glass shard instead of gripping it.

There was a low sigh. A hand tugged a stray piece of hair before tucking it back into place above my head. " _Oh_ , Blaze Pliss _ken_. I've got to say it was a short couple days knowing you'd be here waiting for me so _patient_ ly."

 _Couple days? That was only a couple days?_ With considerable effort, I mustered, "You l... lost to B - "

His muscles bunched and I was skidding across the tiles. My body made a low muffled thump upon impact with the base of the toilet. Loosely tethered consciousness turned my shriek turned into a grunt. "Someone's t-touchy."

I was barely cognizant enough to notice The Joker shuffling away from me. He plucked a duffel bag from the floor. After some mixed metallic shuffling, he removed three jars. _Greasepaint_ , I grasped, as he popped one of the jars open and scooped a messy handful of white onto his jagged cheek. My stomach twisted at the smell and I groaned as he addressed my reflection in the mirror.

"You _did_ try to tell me, cupcake- _kah_. The Gotham people refused to choose _just_ like you did. Oh, well, I'm not the first guy to try to bring to light the piss and shit of Gotham, and I'm not the first guy to hit a little _hiccup_. But you want to know the difference between those other guys and I?"

"In... sanity?"

The kick he threw to my abdomen was so swift I didn't even process it until I was trying to wretch up my ribs.

He spoke over my distressed coughing. "The _difference_ , my _sweet_ ," he started with the black around his eyes, fingers fast and focused, his tone verging on poisonous, "Is that I'm a man of my word. I'm not going to let a guy with knee pads and pointy ears," he stuck his filthy index fingers up at the crown of his head, "keep me from fulfilling the _chaos_ I know you and your wretched city are capable of." I just noticed he was finishing the red around his rumbling scars when he twisted to face me.

" _Speaking_ of which, you wanna know how I got these scars?" He took one step toward me.

"No," I drawled, not in response to his question. My touch-and-go consciousness found me along with my panic.

 _Not again, not again, not again._

I tried to flip myself onto my stomach so I could pull myself away from him. His hand clapped to my bare knee and fondled along my inner thigh. He was trying to pin me, an unnecessary sentiment as a movement so severe as shoving away from him brought along a sensation akin to begin stabbed through the foot. I collapsed with a shriek.

Black pinpricks snapped contemplatively between this place and that along my face and neck. He was seated to the left of me, body humming with anticipation. "My first, she was a fighter _like_ _you_. I gave her a bit of a _marking_ early in our tryst and _she_ thought she'd return the favor. _Sooooo_ I woke up one day to find she'd drugged me and sliced me open. See, I was always telling her to _smile_."

His hand was still on my thigh, his touch as impactful as poison but he made no other move toward me. _Why not just get it over with?_ I supposed I should've expected him to draw out the terrible process of my rape. I imagined very little of the thrill of tormenting me came from the rape itself, but rather the buildup. _Sick fuck._ "You killed her."

"No, no, no, _no_. Well, not until she asked me to. When these were still fresh and _pretty_ , she watched as I got to take these _babies_ for a _spin_. I killed her doggy," he walked two fingers up my leg, the next tip of his finger falling as he listed each of his victims, "and her mommy, sissy number one and two and three as she watched. The _loooooook_ on her littlest sister's _face_ when she saw me at the foot of her little Power Rangers bed… She showed me who I truly _was_ , that'd I'd been hiding behind normalcy all this _time_. She showed me my _art_ form."

My chuckle stopped him short.

"You think you're so fucking special," I spat with considerable effort. "Crazy fucks are a dime a do - "

I anticipated a blow. Instead, his long arm, reminiscent of a spider's leg, extended and the tip of his finger traced over the sole of my foot. I convulsed. His hand gripped my jaw and bounced my head against the cool tiles beneath me. His fingers played along my heaving sternum once my writhing ceased, "Oh, _good_ , you've still got a _little_ fight in you."

I wretched again when he hefted his weight onto my thighs.

 _Fuck. Stall him._ My voice was shaky with a unique cocktail of fear and pain at the effect of his movement on my feet. "W-what, no bullshit, no g... _games_?"

"W-w- _well_ ," he mocked, "I didn't know you were so _anxious_ for your boyfriend to get an eyeful of me wreaking _havoc_ on all your little precious parts. Don't worry, I'll explain it to him in exhaustive detail."

"Leave him alone."

"Mm. Well, since you're just twitching for one last little game," the pads of his fingers tickled down my arms. His nose traced the area just behind my ear, "I'll let you choose which hole I fuck first if you'll talk dirty to me."

"Fucking bastard"

"You'll have to do better than _that_."

His hands were the first torment. Fumbling fingers moved from my thigh, higher and higher, until they ghosted over my shorts to my hip. I winced at his proximity to my most sacred area. He smirked, eyes low, before trailing his finger to my bruised ribs and pressing hard. I groaned before he bent his greasy head to lay a kiss to the fabric atop my wound.

When he leveled an exasperated sigh, I felt his body shudder. "God, you're always just so _mean_ to me." His hand wired further up to my collarbone. His nails traced the ring of bruises looping my neck, his palm cupped the edge of my jaw.

"Maybe, even after all the attention I give you and all the trouble I put in to keep you by my side, I could do something else for you. I could let you pick," he clucked his tongue, "Do you want it soft," he bowed his head to lay a peck in the dip of my heaving clavicle, his voice low and husky," and you can call me Robin? Or," in a brutal flash, his hand clenched around the flesh he just kissed, "I can do it McCreepy's way and you can call me Daddy Number Three? Both of them will be equally dead, it'll honor their memory."

My eyes flipped back into my head for a moment before he released me. I almost prayed he would've let me lose consciousness. We both knew what was coming. The ultimate agony, the worst possible pain I could ever feel.

 _You're Blaze fucking Plissken. You have to fight._

* * *

Blake

I tried to get the answers from him in the rough way. I tried to seek out Batman. I don't think it ever occurred me that there was another way.

Once Gordon persuaded me to bring him in, it took all of an hour for Gordon to leech the address from the bastard. Good timing, too. To no one's surprise, The Joker escaped that day.

In the end, it wasn't pain or the threat of death that would motivate the henchman to liberate his knowledge. It was his little brother collapsing onto his broken sibling in a heap. It was a ten year old who hadn't yet grown into his bones who explained the life Gordon lined up for him and their aunt in witness protection, the new names in a new state with a fresh house.

I didn't even manage to catch the kid's name. The henchman rested his chin against the crown of the child's head and glared at the handcuffs that kept his arms secured to the table. Gordon left them alone in the room to join me behind the glass. After some time, the brothers fell into silence.

And finally, _finally_ , the henchman said in a clear voice still staring his bitten and bruised hands, "880 42nd Street."

We both pivoted to move toward our vehicles. As we crashed through a door and I began to truly sprint, he spoke as he fell behind, "You have three hours until I let him report you for kidnapping."

If he ever sounded as though he loved me even a fraction of how much he loved Blaze, it was then.

* * *

Blaze

Rancorous fingers grasped my breasts through my shirt, surely leaving bruises. His erection was jabbing against my stomach through his pants, his full weight a dreadful anchor.

" _Stop_ ," the word was more like a neurological need than a request. The feeling in my stomach as I slipped ever-closer to unconsciousness reminded me of slipping down a slick slope. My mouth thinned into a grimace, my eyes wheeling.

I used his words like a ledge to try to pull myself from the blackness, "There was nothing that could've passed the time more ex _ped_ iently than thinking about you," he wadded two handfuls of my shirt in either fist, "completely helpless," he shredded the white fabric of my shirt down the middle so my breasts were exposed, "Knowing what I was going to _do_ to my little _cup_ cake when I got back," his hand pressed against my lower back, leaving me no escape as he ground his stiffness against my writhing form. I sobbed, "Made more than my _heart_ throb, that much I can say."

My hands fought with his for a moment. His arm arched back before he landed a thunderous slap to my cheek. Blood fell onto my tongue. The degrading intention behind the hit was not lost on me even in my semi-consciousness.

 _The shards. I skidded one of them behind the toilet._

"What do you think Blakey boy will say, sweet cheeks? Do you think he'll do me the favor of killing him when I'm done with you? If you open those pretty pink lips and beg I might spare him."

 _Oh, god, Blake._ I thought of the months we wasted apart before my first abduction. How stupid he'd been to propose marriage to someone as broken as me, and how stupid I'd been to reject his proposal. In that moment of magnificent dread, my most profound mistakes circled around my inability to commit to Blake.

The Joker ripped my shorts down my legs with particular violence, bringing my drifting mind back. He settled back over me, his knees straining against the fabric of his pants. I was entirely bare to him. Helplessness brought bile to my throat.

 _Focus. Find the fucking shard._

He cupped my folds as he had before. His nails pierced and drew blood from my vulva. My entire body quivered, tears and darkness blurring my vision, my mouth popping open in a beat of shock, "If there's one thing that could make me believe in a god it's a cunt this sweet," long fingers grasped the lower half of my face and his eyes couldn't find a place to settle as he marveled my obvious distress, "You're a tough cookie, I'll give you that. I'd almost hoped that Blakey boy had somehow managed to find you by now so he could have a ticket to the _show_."

My head snapped sideways when I finally managed to rip away my chin. I caught a metallic glint behind the toilet before my face was arrested once more by greasepaint-smeared fingers, " _At ta ta_ , princess. Keep those big hazels on _me_ when I make you mine."

"Not your – "

Hot lips fell onto mine, drowning me in their taste and stench. The only thing keeping my trembling face stable was his hand securing the back of my neck. A tongue, slimy and rapacious, sought mine and suffocated me. The Joker's lips moved and nipped at mine playfully, moving in suffocatingly close and then falling away again.

There was a desperation to his bruising kiss, a violent promise drawing nearer. My nails dug into his neck and face, pulling away still-damp sections of greasepaint. He collected both my hands in one of his as though they were a small nuisance. His pupils grew until they became his irises when he finally pulled away from the scorching kiss. The blackest night consuming a lighter blackness.

"You're shaking. Don't tell me you're scared of little old me?"

" _Stop_."

My hands were pinned still and though the glass shard beckoned me from my peripheral vision, I had no hope of reaching it. There was a metallic crescendo. Dread told me it was a zipper being unzipped.

I tried to fade into the welcomed whiteness of the ceiling. If I couldn't fight him, I would at least keep him from the satisfaction of my screams.

* * *

Blake

It was all I could not to fly down the stairs. I fell into the car not twenty seconds after scribbling down the address.

 _One, two, three_ , I counted way precious seconds as I waited for Gordon to catch up. The engine revved when the door was only half-closed. My sirens wailed, a loud screech that would reach Blaze before I did, and hopefully before The Joker did.

Gordon's lips must've tumbled over each other he spoke into his radio so quick. I jerkily navigated between cars that jumped out of the way for me.

 _I'm coming for you._

* * *

Blaze

My no-scream strategy lasted right up until he started to remove his clothes. "No, no, _NO_!"

His cackle was wild and he finally released me to shrug off clothes that were a bit tight for him. I suspected he stole the clothes from some poor bastard on the way here from the asylum. His raw body, brutal and sharp, was naked before me in seconds.

Hard fingers pinched my chin and tilted it down. I shut my eyes without hesitation, but not before I saw what he wanted me to see. His penis was above average, thick and as angry-looking as he was.

I felt with cruel clarity the head of penis align with my opening. With my eyes closed, the least forgiving part of my mind filled in McCreery's face over The Joker's. Blood tumbled down his arm and onto my neck as I tore at his blindly forearms. His fingers clenched even tighter around my jaw and his voice was loud enough to shake my bones in my limbs, "LOOK AT ME!"

With unconsciousness drawing closer, I saw no reason to concur. I was under no impression he would let me live after this no matter if I complied.

Thin steel traced a cold trail from my sternum to my sobbing belly. The blade found the sensitive skin of my inner thigh.

Head still pressed into my folds, blade still poised near my most vulnerable area, he spoke into my ear surprisingly soft, " _Look_ at me, cupcake."

"Fuck _you_."

* * *

Blake

"How much longer?"

I made quick work of darting between two low sedans. I saw every car, line, and pothole on the road in ultrafine detail, "Seven minutes. I've issued the order but we'll still be the first responders."

"We'll be too late."

"How do you know, kid?"

I shot Gordon a look.

Now that it was time to actually go and save her, I had an unbelievable dread sitting on my lungs like lead. I knew I would find a new version of my Blaze, and the thought alone turned my blood to reluctant poison in my veins.

I knew with a mechanism beyond knowledge that I was too late. I knew I would never be able to save her like she'd saved me. Like she'd saved herself.

* * *

Blaze

He was kissing me again but thankfully, oh-so-thankfully, his lower half pulled away from mine. Or so I thought until I felt his lips began to fall down to my jaw then fall lower and lower again.

I pulled against his fingers against my wrists when his tongue began to make quick work of devouring my left breast. _This_ , I cringed to even think the word, _foreplay isn't what I expected from him._ I released a distressed groan.

He was impatient, as always and he didn't spend long on my breast before he moved lower. My belly he mauled down to my belly, which started to heave when I caught on to his intended target.

"What - what are you _doing_?!"

He released my hands to pin down my hips. My fingers went immediately to The Joker's dark eyes as he marveled me from between my thighs. Annoyed, The Joker made quick work of catching each set of seeking fingers and pinning them as handcuffs would behind my back. His other hand hooked around my thigh, prying one leg away from the other.

I screamed again, tears running rife and true as I felt his giddy breath swirl around my opening. " _Stop! Please!"_

"Mmmm," he appreciated, eyes finally falling from mine so he could peer at the area between my thighs, "Don't flatter yourself, lovely, I just want a quick _taste_ before it's covered in blood and cum."

With that, his tongue trailed up my slit and curled cruelly along my clitoris. My shriek clotted off into a sob at the startling sensation. His wet appendage explored a bit longer before there was a different kiss altogether. The kiss of cold steal against my struggling unpinned leg. He caressed my leg with the blade.

"Does it kill you to know your pathetic boy toy will find you too late and realize eventually he fucked you for the last time. I mean, it's not as though he didn't put in the time for you to put out. All those years hearing you _whine_. No wonder he tried to kill himself."

I loathed myself for letting his words dig into me, for letting myself cry before him. As if I wasn't already in a vulnerable enough position. But I had no hope to move, much less escape with the remaining parts of my dignity intact.

A slap roused me from a momentary lapse in consciousness. I felt the entire half of my face aflame. Various flavors of pain permeated me, not the least of which was the head of him pushing into me once more, "Don't spoil my _fun_."

That was it. That was all the warning I got. The blood that erupted from the cut he issued to my inner thigh did nothing to lubricate his cruel thrust into me.

"NO!" my enraged scream tore through my throat.

It struck me then, after almost a week of torment. It struck me even harder and harsher than his forceful penetration, as I glared through a haze up at his jolting form. _This man is entirely without humanity_. A part of me believed on some plane of consciousness he wouldn't actually rape me. That the reason he'd waited so long to violate me was because he didn't want to.

But, oh, he wanted to. The ridiculous facade dropped like a veil midway through his first thrust. His eyes were lidded, not consumed with his own pleasure as McCreery's had been. Instead, they were focused on my face as he tore my last shred of dignity from me. It was the power he held over me, the distress he could drown me and others in that got him off more-so than any physical friction.

 _What pain was there that was greater than this?_ I would have taken a million deaths, a million burned foot soles rather than feel his hair tickle my chin as his body jolted upward.

He snapped his hips back, then stabbed me up the hilt with his penis once again. I gasped, stretching to claw at his face. Anything to make him look away. His lower half didn't move as he busied himself with pinning my hands beneath one of his once more. I poured every ounce of myself into resisting his fingers that were all too eager to snatch my wrists. He was so strong. Stronger than any sane man could be. Every muscle fiber recruited in my arm provided the smallest obstacle to him. His muscles stood out starkly in his arms, seeming to mock me with their power.

 _One hand claimed both of mine above my head. I've won,_ his gaze jeered before he trailed open-mouth kisses down my throat.

"Get the fuck off me – AGH!" I screeched when he bit down on clavicle.

He straightened, thinner red slipping down his chin. Blood. My blood. Uneven scars pulled up his face so they nearly touched his ears. Body ringing with smugness, he started to slam into me rhythmically. Any tugs I issued against his fingers around my wrists were useless.

His thumb found my cheek, catching a runaway tear. I pulled my face away, hating the intimacy of his touch. His yellow teeth taunted me in flashes as his face oscillated in front of me, then fell back, "Don't tell me little old me made you _cry_ , sweet pea," his voice was breathless, natural without its usual forced lilt and light with the thrill of the victory, "You might just like it as much as you liked getting eaten out by McCreery."

I nearly welcomed unconsciousness then. It beckoned me to briefly lose myself in the swallowing whiteness of the ceiling. I tried to think of Blake. If he couldn't be there to save me physically, the thought of him at least could provide a small reprieve. He existed behind my eyelids amber-eyed and saturated in moonlight and mourning. Humorless, complex and beautiful.

A fumbling hand to my clitoris maliciously snapped me back to the nightmare. He bared down on it with a harsh series of rubs that made sharp, maddening pain shoot from my core to my throat and extremities. _How is more pain even possible?_

"There it is," impossibly, his thrusts deepened as sweat gathered beneath his makeup. His limp greenish hair hung like a discolored curtain over his cheeks, swaying with his stabs. "I was beginning to think you didn't have that hopelessness - mm - in you, princess. Oooohh," he shuddered laughingly again as I tried to wriggle out from under him for what felt like the thousandth time and ended up only grinding into him. He clenched one hand around my throat and one through my hair. I was immobile and entirely exposed.

 _This cannot be happening. This cannot be happening._

With three more sharp thrusts and one more wretched scream from me, he finished inside of me. He arched up and pounded so hard into me I swore I felt him smack into my cervix. His grunt and the feeling of fluid filling me made the back of my throat burn. The chokehold around my neck gradually loosened into a caress. I closed my eyes shut tight as I felt viscous liquid fall out of my opening. He huffed massive breaths into the crook of my neck, the tension in his body everywhere but around my wrists falling away.

"You're mine now."

I gradually opened my eyes to peer down at him. He thumbed my rebloodied scar, a shark's smile contorting his marred face. Sweat was creasing his greasepaint, his full lips were parted and two different shades of red. His eyes were still hazy with lust as he met my gaze and something told me the nightmare was far from over. Hate consumed my dwindling being, infusing me with a second wind.

The way he said it. _You're mine **now**. _ As if I belonged to McCreery after he raped me, and my ownership was granted to my newest tormentor. A sliver of cold chased down my spine.

Spit splattered across his face.

He froze. A glint of malevolence fell across his features. A long bloody hand dragged across the globs of saliva on his cheek. He seemed to contemplate me beneath him for a moment from behind his ghastly makeup. I cherished the moment before my punishment surely tumbled in. Surely he didn't think my fire could be staunched so easily?

My spit still on his hand, he jolted into movement. He still hadn't removed himself from me. His wet hand fell on my opening and I felt my face contort in realization. In fact, he seemed to be finding a second wind of his own.

"NO!"

He thrust out, then in again with a punishing snap of his hips as my outraged scream fell around us.

Every movement shifted my skin enough to illicit a rhythmic twist of pain from my feet. My bullet wounded shoulder ground against the filthy tiles as he pummeled me. The feeling of him inside of me was as painful then as it was before due to my complete lack of arousal. While the physical pain of it was far from the greatest on my body in that moment, the emotional pain of his rutting was sharp enough to obliterate all else. "YOU FUCKING _BASTARD_!"

"That raaage, sweetling. Those tiny pathetic -" he paused to bare his teeth in a particularly ghastly round of euphoria as he thrust into me, "Screams and struggles. Are you trying to turn me on, tiny hellcat?"

My eyes snapped to his, but I swallowed my protest. The last thing he needed to know was how much that nickname reminded me of Blake, how he was the only one left from college who still called me that. It must've still been written all over my face, though, because he gave a perverse chuckle, "I think I found a new favorite nickname." The slap of his skin against mine deepened my cringe.

My voice belonged to a more powerful, more fully conscious girl. A voice so furious certainly didn't belong to me, being pinned down and covered in his sweat and hands. I was so entirely pitiful, so wholly ashamed and small. More pitiful, even, because I was feeling what The Joker wanted me to feel. In every organ of my body, in ever cubic inch of my mind, I was feeling what he wanted me to feel. The Joker was tall, strong, lithe. Sharp shoulders digging into me, his harsh fingers overlapping over my wrists and squeezing hard enough to break something. "GET _OFF_!"

"Poor choice of _words."_

I gasped as he pulled himself out of me. There was a moment of foolish hope on my part that he would stop his assault. Instead, he teased me with the head before jaggedly entering me again. My scream was that of the condemned.

At some point he picked up his blade while slamming into me. He reopened the slice on my cheek with the blade before he issued a powerful punch to my gut.

The knife touched to my neck before I was jarringly flipped so I sat atop him. He continued to thrust into me from beneath as I coughed and wheezed. The only thing keeping me upright as the room whirled and darkened impossibly was his hand on my ribs.

Glinting brought me back from the edge of unconsciousness. I turned my head to it lazily, gulping at the cut my movement caused at my throat. The Joker's thrusts were growing fitful, desperate. A low growl grumbled from somewhere in his chest. Just as he swiped the blade to slice the surface of my belly, he jerked his hips up to empty himself into me once more. I fell blindly to the side. He was beyond noticing, lost in ecstasy as he ascended. By some small miracle, my fingers found something smooth and cool. The shard.

Fingers fumbled find purchase on my bloody abdomen as he rode his pleasure to its maximum.

He pushed me off him, finally pulling his dick from me. I shuddered, nearing physical sickness at the sensation of even more of his sticky seed between my legs. With every ounce of consciousness I had left, I grasped the shard behind the toilet.

* * *

Blake

Of all the colors in the world, the house in which my Blaze was held was the same muted green as The Joker's hair, the same as one of the many rings of color in my Blaze's hazel eyes. I'd turned my sirens on silent the closer I drew.

My heart forgot to beat when we skidded to a stop. The door to the home was ajar.

"Fuck."

I derailed the part of my brain that descended into an immediate spiral. I all-but flew through the door. My gun was drawn like an extension of my hand. I was faintly aware of Gordon inches from my back.

At first, I could decipher no sound, no movement in the sparsely decorated living room. I trapped my desire to scream her name in my throat. I couldn't risk letting The Joker know we were here yet if he did, indeed come back for her.

After a chilling moment of a feeling I can only describe as, "shit where the fuck is she?" there was a muffled thump from upstairs. The sound was not unlike a body against tile.

* * *

Blaze

The Joker didn't remain dormant for long. After a couple seconds of half-gasping, half-giggling behind me, his weight fell onto my back. He yanked me up by my hair as he had the night he found me in the police station. He spoke lowly in my ear, amusement at my distress evident, "What do you _think_ , Blazey, you want to cuddle a little until I'm ready to go again?"

"Not a-again..."

"Oh, come now, I'm not being much of a gentleman, am I? I don't think you've come yet." His hand tickled down the back of my thigh.

 _"Stop."_

"Better get the whole 'stop' thing out of your system. You're not gunna be saying that when you're all sweaty and sweet beneath me."

"Get off."

His chuckle was light, unbidden, not as forced as usual. With every ounce of myself, I'd fought back. And it wasn't enough. I was raped again, by a different man even after I struggled and scraped and screamed until my muscles gave out. The knowledge of what just happened, of what could keep happening swallowed me.

The pulse in his throat beat unevenly against the side of my neck. The thought of another minute of that torture brought bile to my throat. He dragged his wet tongue up the side of my wincing face from jaw to temple. I thought past the revulsion and pain. My fingers fumbled to find the pulse on the opposite side of his throat. He snorted, letting my head fall back to the tile. He snatched my seeking fingers, using them as leverage to spin me onto my back. Pain panged up from my feet.

Several things happened all at once: there was the distinct sound of heavy footfalls ascending the stairs, The Joker's greasy head snapped toward it almost in disbelief, and I pondered The Joker's vile face in profile. I followed the white greasepaint down to his jaw, then onto his neck where his pulse still throbbed from exertion.

And then, with a swing that belonged to a much more physically powerful person, I sunk the shard deep into The Joker's neck.

He didn't seem particularly shocked. In fact, his face didn't express much at all as he processed the surely fatal stab. Blood misted across my face as he coughed lightly after a suspended moment. With a great shove, his weight fell to the side. He relieved the shard from his own neck with blind fingers. The newly bloodied glass turned into smaller splinters as The Joker tossed it to the side.

Liquid, suspiciously red in color considering his lack of humanity, made quick work of collecting in thin linear streams in the caulk between the tiles.

I had no idea where I found the strength, but I managed to pull my surely dying body over to him. Two dark eyes found me as he spluttered. He was trying to talk around the blood clogging his larynx and around, much to my dismay a still-chilling smile. I pressed a forearm to his throat, putting a stopper on his futile efforts, "Someone had to get you to finally shut the fuck up."

My snarling face, the face of an unexpected equal, was the last thing The Joker saw before the chaos died in his eyes.

The threat of unconsciousness, despite my still-seeping wounds, faded. My blackened vision cleared cruelly so I could witness as two heartbreakingly familiar faces marvel me as though I was a monster of sorts. The worst kind of monster, made of the bones and tissue of a woman once loved.

The contortion faded from their faces so quickly I thought I imagined it. Gordon and my sweet, scared Blake rushed to me with hurried hands as sirens fell around us.

Golden eyes stayed pinned to mine. Full lips made a point of saying things for which my impaired mind had no use. Apart from when he first walked in, Blake didn't even so much as glance at my gory bare bones. He scooped me up and stepped over The Joker's still form.


	17. Rise, An Epilogue

Rise, An Epilogue

A labored turn of my head revealed Gordon dirtying his boots in blood. He was kneeling by The Joker. I looked away from the body so quick you'd think the sight of it electrocuted me. I stared up at Blake, who was visibly trying to ignore the subtly screaming _drip drip drip_ of blood and fluids from between my legs and onto the hardwood. I was, for all intents and purposes, lifeless in his arms. Careful movements slid us through doorways without causing unnecessary damage to my charred feet. However, with every step he took a burning pulse leeched away a little more of my consciousness.

I felt alarmingly little when Robin pressed a towel to my stomach to keep the blood inside. New bodies filtered in to add to my embarrassment, my anger, my fear. When I was gingerly lain onto a gurney, I was still quite sure I was imagining this all. I eyed up Gordon in particular, who had returned to my side, whom I thought to be dead by The Joker's hand.

I clutched the hands of both of my probably imagined men as new hands busied themselves over me. Without removing himself from my death grip, Robin's lips shifted as he jabbed a finger into the chest of an EMT. I had to channel every ounce of my being into hearing him, "You focus on her. Don't even bat an eyelash at the asshole upst – "

I tugged on his hand to stop him causing unnecessary trouble. Gordon's thoughts aligned with mine, "If there's something those EMT's have that can help him no one will ever die again. He's gone already."

 _He's gone already, he's gone already, he's gone already._

Finally, with a little help from an IV, I was swallowed in what I thought to be death.

* * *

The Joker was my first and last thought of the day for three years. Three years after a nurse watched me gulp down 'Plan B' pills, three years after I woke to a sharp throb between my legs with a white-hot howl, I would still feel the subconscious press of trauma. Greasepaint fermented in my frontal lobe, seizing me at the most inopportune times and with the smallest amount of provocation.

There was no point in lying about my rape to Blake. I fantasized, ever the masochist, about never having to share my lowest moment with one I loved so dearly. Though there was nothing as damning as a video cataloging the event, Robin would've seen the evidence between my thighs when he picked me up from the bathroom that night. I was certain I would eventually have to tell him.

It took six months and a new beginning for me to form the words.

Robin moved with me to Chicago. It was when we were painting the walls to our bedroom a shade called "buttercream" that I turned to him and my voice finally found me. He was still scared of me then.

Rare though they were with the trauma so fresh, my truth started with a kiss. That day, six months after the horror, I watched Robin's back ripple as he slid the foam cream-colored barrel up the wall. I watched him first out of the corner of my eye, then more full-on. Sunlight drenched him and I was reminded of an only slightly simpler time. I laid a pale finger on the skin of his back where his shirt pulled away from the cusp of his jeans. His arm froze mid-stroke up the wall. An amber eye sized me up, crinkled at the corners.

He used his cop voice, "Can't keep your hands to yourself, little lady?"

I smiled. He let me flip him so his back pressed to the freshly painted wall. Neither of us pretended to particularly care about the wet paint.

I pressed to Robin's lips the kind of kiss that I thought I'd never have again. My Robin's mouth was tender and earnest all at once, always tasting of a desperate sort of thankfulness. If there was one thing tragedy taught me, it was to appreciate beautiful moments.

But there was that fear again, in the set of his shoulders and the unfamiliar hesitation in his hands. I would never get used to it. I sighed against his clavicle, pulling away from him. "You're scared. You're scared you're going to scare me."

"Of course, I am."

"You've watched over me so well in the past couple months. You moved for me."

He knew what was coming even before I did. "Blaze... You don't have to."

"I want to say it out loud so you know I'm not getting crushed by it anymore. So we can be like we used to."

We sat crisscrossed applesauce against the damp wall. His Slayer shirt got ruined by buttercream and I told him everything. He held my heavy gaze the whole time, ever-aware of my analysis of his facial expression. He tried to keep the pain out of his eyes, but how could he when his fears were acknowledge, verbalized? When I was finally done, he was far away. Rare tears peppered dark splotches around his shirt collar. I hated causing such pain in him but this was a healing that both of us needed. I knew of which particular torment he would speak before he even opened his mouth, "I couldn't save you. I tried so hard and it wasn't enough."

"No, _no_. You saved me. Sometimes I think about everything… about the fact that I killed someone, about how you came right as I was about to die. I think… once he raped me, there was only one way for me to be okay with myself afterward. If I got to watch him realize that in at least one way, I won. You saved me right after I killed him and you continue to save me every day. You're my only family. I don't think people with no family after something like this stay the same person… I think the person you know as Blaze Plissken would've been dead if it wasn't for you." That seemed to satisfy him. For the moment.

"I almost got arrested."

The admission brought on a surprised giggle, "What?"

"Yeah… I asked the goon who watched over you a couple times not-so-nicely where you were."

"Huh. I don't think I've ever heard you use a euphemism before."

He couldn't meet my eyes. "I knocked him out. Tied him to a chair and broke my hand beating him up. It felt so wrong being so cruel but it didn't feel like a choice. I needed to get you back… Oh, and at one point I sort of had Gordon at gunpoint."

"Blake…"

"I didn't like who I became when you were in danger, Blaze. I'm not proud of what I did but… I don't know, the more I think about it, I don't think I would do anything different if I had to do it again."

"And Gordon and that guy just took it? Are you wanted for something?"

"The goon decided not to press charges and he's serving his time quietly. And Gordon thinks he's so funny, every time I bring up the fact that I had a gun in his face he pretends like the incident never happened. It's a good goddamn thing he likes you so much."

"Why didn't you tell me this?"

"Because I became this monster. I didn't sleep once, not once that whole time you were gone… I hurt someone I loved, I basically tortured a guy. And I couldn't even get to you before he did. I was scared after everything you've been through you would be scared of me. How am I better than the men that hurt you?"

I hadn't noticed, but in the course of our talk, we both moved to white-knuckle each other's hands. His hand was the perfect size. Our fingers simply looked right together, like two cogs in a clock. The pads of his fingers reached nearly to my wrist and he had some freckles of his own sprayed across his tanned knuckles.

"We've both done terrible things. Even if you were a real monster, I would have trouble leaving you... You know, my mother left writings about my father. She said my father, even after he died, would always carry a part of her with him. I don't feel like that with you. I feel like you _are_ the part of me."

* * *

His fear of me still bled into the nights even after I told him everything. He had to cage me in his arms to keep me from thrashing more nights than I'd care to admit. My nightmares were nothing if not vivid, coated in red greasepaint and redder blood. Sometimes the blood belonged me to, sometimes The Joker, sometimes McCreery, a lot of times Blake.

The things I did and didn't do devastated me quite equally but Robin was always, _always_ there.

We healed together in that tiny apartment in Chicago. Distance to the horrors and proximity to one another was our saving grace. The Joker might've been my first thought every morning, but Blake was my second. I was thankful every day I woke with his warmth by my ribs.

Years passed along with the ebbing pain. Time lent me the gift of foresight. As I would surface from bouts of numbing depression, I began to notice Robin's eyes glassing over more than usual. I would wake in the morning to his comfortable silhouette in the window more often than not. It took me quite some time to pin down the look in his eyes as he was mulling over the geometric skyline, "You miss Gotham."

He started, sleep-rustled hair bouncing. Flopping back down onto the bed with me, he ran a thumb over the thin scar over my cheekbone almost absentmindedly. His eyes seemed to have captured flecks of fresh sunlight, his freshly-grown beard protesting against his pillow, "Now just what in the hell are you doing up on a Sunday before three in the afternoon?"

"Don't change the subject. You miss your home. That's why you're always looking down at the city like it's a stranger you don't quite trust."

I sunk my legs into the web of his. My fingers dusted over one of the pinkish scars on his thigh. One stripe of raised tissue was about the length of a pencil, skinny and horizontal on his left leg. The other was about the size of a quarter, raised and pale around the edges and sunken in the center. A slice and bullet wound, respectively.

My own scars I could get used to seeing. Blake's scars, I never would.

"I know what you're thinking. How can I miss a city that did _that_ to me?" he was pouting at my hand over his leg, "But I do. I can't explain it."

I didn't know why I was surprised by his revelation. As long as I'd known him, Blake was loyal in his bones to the things he loved. I just hadn't realized Gotham was one of them.

"Do you remember the Snips?"

He released a chuckle that was genuine yet far away. The whole bed jostled lightly as he settled closer to me, "I haven't thought of them in a long time."

"I remember when they returned you back to the orphanage. They were the only parents interested in you and they were nice as hell. I remember wishing they would've taken both of us. You never told me why, after a whole year, they decided they didn't want you…"

"They went against the advice of the adoption agency. They kept insisting I call them 'mom' and 'dad.'"

I couldn't keep down the smile. "So the Snips are the Chicago of families."

"I'm sorry. I wanted to love Chicago. I wanted us to start a new life together away from all the horror in Gotham. You're all I ever wanted."

"That's not true. You like to help people, you _need_ to help people."

"I do… but I'm a policeman here too. It just… doesn't feel the same. I thought I would get used to it."

"Chicago doesn't need help like Gotham does, with crazy neurotoxins and crashing trains and nuclear bombs and men in masks… Gordon and the DA are still pushing through the trial to incarcerate all those gang members. Gotham has had heroes and villains and the truest evils… Maybe – "

"Don't say it, Blaze. I'm not going back to Gotham. When will we have time to get married?"

He turned a little pink when I laughed. Marriage seemed more like an abstract impossibility than a future for us, "I'm not going to keep you captive with me under the weight of marriage in a city you don't like. How could I live with myself if, after everything you've done for me, I kept you from what you really wanted?"

"You're what I want."

"Does it look like I'm going anywhere?"

* * *

Blake returned back to his home after three years with me in Chicago.

We never made a pact to remain faithful, nor did we try not to fall in love with someone else. We didn't need to. No one would be as good for us as we were for each other. Every person I met in Chicago, romantic or otherwise, felt like a lamp getting held up to the standards of the sun.

We made the trip at least once a week to be together, sometimes him to me and sometimes me to him. It became easier to return to Gotham when I knew Blake was waiting for me. Any sentimentality I felt toward that city was vastly overshadowed by the pain it brought me. I felt nothing whenever I left Gotham. Chicago brought me the new life I was meant to share with Blake.

We both grew stronger. It did us good, I think, to be defined by something other than one another for once. Blake would tell me week after week about his exploits as a Gotham policeman with the same vigor as a child explaining what he learned at school.

If we could make it through our weekly meetings without mauling each other, Blake would train me. My stride as I walked to work past leering men became longer, stronger, surer as I learned to defend myself. I began to pursue more combat training outside of my time with Blake. I watched as my legs and arms grew strong again. I looked at myself in the mirror and sometimes saw a warrior instead of a twice-made victim.

Though the physical distance between us was at times stifling, I never believed we were truly separate. Apart, but always together, we grew.

* * *

I took it for granted, our togetherness. I don't think I ever thought we'd be pulled apart again.

Something was changing in Gotham. Another evil. The week before the new evil became something more than a whisper in a dark alley, Blake briefly mentioned during one of our Sunday meetings, "The kids at the orphanage… they're suffering. The donations are slowing down and when kids age out they're kicked out. Everyone's quick to say that Gotham is free of crime now. How can they say that when kids are living in the goddamn sewers?"

"Sewers? What in the holy hell are they doing in the sewers?"

"Kids say there's work down there. I alerted some higher-ups about it and they were eternally unhelpful, as always. Eighteen year olds are trickling out of the underground like floating trash, shot or stabbed to death. Yet everyone is saying that Gotham is 'free of crime.' I keep forgetting that no one cares about orphans until they're dead or billionaires."

"Gotham still needs people like you."

That statement turned out to be a lot truer than I would've hoped. It was the Sunday following that when my world grew tired of holding itself up and let itself crash back to the ground again. Blake was uncharacteristically late to our weekly meeting. After a couple minutes of glaring at the coffee shop door, my phone rang.

I snapped the phone to my ear, but no sooner did I impart, "Hello?" before the line went dead. A glance at the caller ID informed me it was, indeed, Blake who called and apparently hung up.

 _Something's wrong._ It'd been so long, almost seven years, since I felt the sickening tug of dread on my stomach.

I phased back into the pleasant hum of voices around me in the crowded coffee shop. A voice cut through the cacophony, "…come to you with another update on the tragedy in Gotham." I felt my legs stand, my thoughts straining at the seams, "The city, besieged by yet another unusual criminal, has been entirely shut down under the threat of a nuclear explosion." My elbows propped up against the bar for support as a flash of a massive metal-masked man filled the TV screen, "A man who calls himself Bane has led a terrorist attack on thousands of bystanders at a Gotham Wildcats football game. During the attack, the terrorist proceeded to murder nuclear physicist Doctor Loenid Pavel. He claimed that Pavel was the only man who could disarm a nuclear bomb which currently threatens the lives of the twelve million souls in Gotham if any Gothamites attempt to exit the city. Hundreds are dead from the initial explosion at the Gotham City Stadium, hundreds more members of the Gotham Police Department trapped beneath the city in the sewers. We go now to Vicki Vale, who stands outside of the just-destroyed Gotham bridge…"

I pushed myself back from the counter. My face felt cold.

 _What if he's already dead? What if Gordon's already dead? This can't be happening. Not again, not again…_

I stumbled into the Chicago day and jogged to my car several blocks away, oblivious to the unkind stares of those around me. I felt my sundress flutter up behind me, my heels scuffing evenly on the pavement. I made the four hour ride to Gotham in three hours. I must've dialed Gordon and Blake thirty times each in the course of the drive, swallowing tears all the way.

The neighboring city's police blockade stopped me several blocks north of Gotham Bridge. I left my car running and door ajar, smoothing my hair away from my face as I joined the gathering crowd along with the edges of the blockade.

"…doing everything we can, sir. Any entrances or exits from the cities will only further agitate the terrorists and put the lives of twelve million at risk," I listened to the overtly rehearsed speech with urgency, absorbing every syllable.

"Is James Gordon alive?" my voice cut through the crowd straight to the one poor officer tasked with calming the agitated crowd. Other policeman hung back in a concerted line, unmoved by the struggling officer's plight. "Where can we find a list of the deceased?"

"Ma'am, due to the lack of police force inside the quarantine zone, the deceased have only been partially cataloged. An incomplete list has been released in most of the major outlets."

Further questions burst from snarling mouths, suffocating the voice of the officer entirely. I fell back from the mess of bodies and thumbed through my phone. Neither Gordon nor Blake were on the list of the dead, though that was only a small reassurance. As I scrolled through the list for the second time to assure I didn't miss their names, Robin's picture popped up on my phone in a caller ID.

"Blake?"

"Blaze! I'm alive, I'm with Gordon. We're safe."

I fell heavily onto the pavement. His words were as physically relieving as a gulp of air for a drowning man. " _Fuck_ , I thought – I thought you were dead. When I heard the police were trapped... I'm outside Gotham right now."

"I should've stayed with you in Chicago. This place is a beacon for terrible shit. I don't know how long this is going to last, I don't know if anyone is going to help us."

"You'll make it out of this, Robin. You're with your city."

"I love you, Blaze. I'll call you when I can."

And then, for too many hellish months, he was gone.

I watched the only two people I loved go through hell from the sidelines. I divided my time between working in Chicago and staying in a motel just outside of Gotham. Blake called me once, maybe twice during the time that Bane occupied Gotham. If I wasn't positively mad before, I certainly drove myself to madness as I learned the true meaning of the word "wait." I tormented myself in the day with the thought that I would never see Robin or Gordon again. I tormented myself in the night with the thought that I should've married Robin. I should've been selfish and horrible.

The news stations in the areas surrounding Gotham surely lost some viewers after the initial months. Beyond the chaos, there was not much else to report on. Mentions of Gotham went from frequent presents to rare heart attacks. I lived and died by the television. Weeks of exquisite worry reformatted my mind and sleeping patterns to accept new knowledge.

I only brought two things to my motel on the outskirts of Gotham: a punching bag and athletic tape. My knuckles became dangerous versions of themselves. I pummeled my own helplessness. The fresh tragedy offered me clarity beyond clarity. I would never allow horror to touch the lives of my beloved again. Day in and day out, I suffocated the tangible parts of my weakness. Martial arts, weapons training, gun shooting. I was nowhere near the best but I was getting somewhere.

A ghost to my own misfortune, I found myself stalking the houses in which I was raped. I worked my way down from my lesser misery. The old McCreery house was inhabited by a new family, the trees longer and larger and bushes different shapes than I remembered. I never saw the new inhabitants, only the evidence of them spilling onto the modest lawn to the two-story. After a couple visits, the McCreery house just outside of the Gotham bridge was just a house.

The muted green house was more complex. The wound, though over seven years old, was raw when I inspected the peeling paint. Possessed, my feet shuffled through the mulch that I once crab-walked through. There was still a slight rise in the rubber lining beneath the garage door from when I broke the arm of the henchman, Mane. The muted green house was unoccupied, decrepit. Media coverage following my rape made the home a local celebrity, a realtor's nightmare.

Without Blake, I grew hateful, cynical, sick. I molded myself into someone I loathed and, when self-loathing curled inside me and staggered my feet, I stopped evaluating myself altogether. But in the midst of war, it was more important to be useful than lovely. It wasn't until Blake and I were together again that I would, for the first time in my life, be both.

* * *

The bomb exploded and the hero died. I would soon learn both of these would be victories disguised as losses. The bomb only killed one as opposed to millions and the only thing dead about Batman was his status as a vigilante. He lived, along with Gotham, as a suspected martyr.

If the news hadn't alerted me to the death of Bane and the fall of his hanging sword over the city, the sound of the bomb exploding would've. My heart sunk as a magnificent rumble broke me from my assault on my punching bag. I raced outside, fingers reaching to unravel the athletic tape from around my knuckles. A heavy plume of smoke feathered out above me. It took me a terribly long beat to realize that the plume was farther away from Gotham than it should've been, so far west it must have hung over the ocean.

Leaving the door to my motel room ajar, I jogged to my car. I ripped the last of the tape off my hands so I could better grip the wheel. Punching the radio, it took mere moments of listening as I screeched toward the heart of Gotham for me to realize the threat was passed. Most of the flow of traffic was leaving Gotham, through the single service tunnel left untouched by Bane. One thin stream of cars trickled into Gotham when they opened the bridge. People like me, with loved ones.

I didn't have to call him to know where he'd be. The orphanage doors were split wide, devoid of the sparse family reunions littering Main Street. There was no place for that sort of relief there.

When I saw him again, he was just shrugging onto the street. His face was surprisingly clean-shaven and he was outfitted in serious-looking navies and blacks. He was thumbing through his phone, and just as I brought my car to a screeching stop, my pocket buzzed.

Even from afar I could tell he was changed again. He looked up and, for a fraction of a moment, he was guarded. The iron plate in his eyes fell and he looked at me like I was a hand reaching out to him as he dangled off a cliff. He jogged to meet me. Before I could even wrap my arms around him, he encased me in a deliberate and desperate kiss that I dissected completely. His lips sipped every gulp of tired passion from me and somehow made everything in the past months a worthy sacrifice.

"I am never letting you out of my sight again," I gasped in the momentary bubble of space between our mouths.

"I missed you, Blaze Plissken."

"God, I fucking missed you t – " and we were kissing again, drunk with each other.

Blake was as busy making friends inside of Gotham as I was making a machine out of myself on the outside. Blake, Gordon, Batman and Selena Kyle saved Gotham. There was no other way to phrase it. Robin alternated between calling her Selena Kyle and Catwoman. Batman went by two names as well.

We were way past secrets. Bruce Wayne left him something fantastic and terrible in his will. Robin went to it first and I bounced my knee in his apartment, still anxious to be without him even for a matter of hours.

He called me and told me change into hiking gear. I corralled my hair back. I let my curls fly away this place and that, loving the wild look in my eyes. I was still short, but my arms were lean, my legs shapely and strong. My freckles were tumbling and dark, the scars on my cheek, mouth and stomach varying degrees of pink and white.

I looked dangerous.

"Ready, beautiful? Have I got something for you to see…"

He was lighter on the drive. Bright and sharp, excited. To a passerby, we would've looked like high school lovers holding hands over the gearshift. The hike would've been lengthy with someone else. Eventually, we made it to a rig of sorts. Robin went to work strapping itself into it.

"What are you doing?" I followed the rope up, wondering where he meant to swing. There was a dominant white waterfall that emitted a stunning rush of sound.

"Hold on to me," I sized him up with an arched brow and a small smile, "Come on, love. You're gunna want to see this."

I looped my arm around his taught shoulders. My stomach jumped slightly when he pushed us off from the ledge and we began a low arc into the waterfall. The falling water pushed back against us and we fell into a deep black chasm. We were both positively drenched, landing a little hard but otherwise unharmed. Blake unstrapped himself from the harness as I inspected the austere cave which, though large held nothing of interest.

"What is this place?"

He didn't reply, he merely claimed my hand and stepped us both forward.

I started and slunk low when the floor beneath us began to rise.

* * *

Author's Notes

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you're familiar with the Batman comic books and recent Arkham games, hopefully you gathered that Blaze was my take on Gordon's daughter Barbara Gordon. For those of you who aren't familiar with her, Barbara becomes Batgirl and fights alongside Batman and Robin for many years before she's paralyzed by The Joker. Barbara later uses her intelligence to help Batman in other ways as the Oracle, a hacker and informant. I've gathered that in the current comic universe, she's regained the use of her legs. Blaze is only loosely based off of Barbara, but hopefully you can see the relation. Physically, they look similar with red hair and pale skin. Both are loved and protected by Gordon and extremely intelligent and brave. Blaze's immobilization after The Joker burns her feet in my story was meant to mimic the way the comicverse Joker paralyzed Barbara with a gunshot to the spine. Barbara and Tim Drake, one of the Arkhamverse Robins, were also an item for quite some time just as Blake and Blaze are. I wanted to try my hand at mirroring Nolan's take on the original Robin and Catwoman with another character.

Also, I wanted to pay homage to one of my favorite shitty action stars, Snake Plissken from Escape from New York. He inspired Blaze's last name, as well as some of her and Blake's character traits and lines. As serious as the subject matter for this story is, I wanted to have fun writing it. Speaking of which, if I was lame enough to add theme songs to this they'd be "Degausser" by Brand New and "Ready, Able" by Grizzly Bear.

Please feel free to review, I love the feedback!


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